Green Energy Blog Series: Are We on Track?
The Goal That Should Define
Minnesota’s Clean Energy Workforce Strategy
Minnesota has set some of the most ambitious clean energy goals in the country. A 100% carbon-free electricity grid by 2040. Net-zero economywide by 2050. 100,000 clean energy jobs by 2030. These are not modest aspirations. They are commitments that will reshape the state’s economy, its workforce, and its future.
But stated goals and measurable progress are two different things. And the question I keep coming back to is: Are we actually on track? Not in a rhetorical sense—but in a data sense. Do we know, with any precision, how many workers we need, in which occupations, in which regions, and on what timeline? Do our education and training systems know where to invest? Do policymakers have a roadmap that connects workforce planning to specific goals?
The honest answer, right now, is: not yet—but that is exactly what a growing ecosystem of researchers, policymakers, employers, and workforce practitioners across Minnesota is working to change. And it is the central challenge driving Stratasight’s work under our grant with McKnight Foundation.
This is the first post in our Green Jobs Blog Series—a running thread of analysis, insight, and honest reflection as we build toward Stratasight’s forthcoming Green Jobs Talent Supply and Demand Report. Our goal is not just to produce research. It is to help translate complexity into clarity, and clarity into action, for the leaders who are navigating this transition right now.
A Lot Is Happening—And That’s the Point
Before I get to the strategic question at the heart of this post, I want to acknowledge something that does not always get enough credit: the breadth and quality of work already happening across Minnesota’s clean energy and workforce landscape. For those of us immersed in it, it can feel overwhelming. For those on the outside, it may not be visible enough.
Clean Energy Economy Minnesota (CEEM) publishes the annual Clean Jobs Midwest report, which documents the growth of clean energy employment across the region and makes the economic case for continued investment. Their data consistently show that Minnesota’s clean energy sector is growing—and that the companies driving it are hungry for talent.
Last year, Stratasight (then RealTime Talent) published a deep-dive labor market report on the Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) Career and Technical Education cluster, commissioned by the Minnesota State Energy Center of Excellence. That report found approximately 187,240 people employed statewide in roles aligned to the ENR cluster, with a low aggregate occupational unemployment rate of 1.7% and strong wage premiums—signals of a tight labor market with high demand. It also mapped ENR’s interdisciplinary footprint, showing how ENR careers connect to construction, advanced manufacturing, supply chain, and public service—clusters that will all be touched by the energy transition.
At the state level, the 2026 Climate Action Framework (CAF) from Minnesota’s Climate Change Subcabinet stands as the most comprehensive expression of where Minnesota is headed and why the pace must accelerate. The CAF is Minnesota’s statewide plan to reduce climate pollution—greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—and prepare communities for climate change in ways that benefit all Minnesotans. It reflects the contributions of hundreds of Minnesotans and invites all of us to contribute to creating a climate future in which everyone is healthy and safe. The urgency it conveys is grounded in real data: Minnesota’s emissions have decreased 18% from 2005 to 2022, which represents meaningful progress. But emissions increased 5.1% between 2020 and 2022 as economic activity rebounded following the COVID-19 pandemic—a reminder that progress is not linear and that sustained, accelerated action is required. Minnesotans are also feeling the impacts of climate change more acutely: more unhealthy air quality days, more extreme rainfall events, and more costs associated with both. The 2026 CAF reflects new opportunities, the progress Minnesota has made, and the clear need to move faster. It is the broadest and most consequential policy framework shaping the context for all of the work described in this post.
At the regional scale, the Metropolitan Council’s Draft Comprehensive Climate Action Plan (CCAP)—a distinct document from the statewide CAF, developed with support from Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) and guided by an EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grant—provides a more targeted roadmap for reducing emissions across the Twin Cities metro area. Importantly, the CCAP includes a workforce planning analysis that acknowledges a fundamental challenge facing all of this work: there is no single dataset that cleanly tracks “green jobs” in Minnesota. The plan identifies approximately 39,100 clean energy workers in the 11-county region in 2024, with climate-relevant industries projected to grow 17% by 2032 compared to 13% in non-climate sectors. But it also acknowledges that this growth will be uneven and that workforce strategies must be flexible.
The effort Stratasight is most directly involved in is the Clean Energy Workforce Table, convened by McKnight Foundation and facilitated by Anna Farro Henderson. Erin Olson, Stratasight’s Senior Director of Strategic Research, represents our organization at the table and plays an active role in its project work. The Table brings together organizations from across Minnesota’s workforce, education, employer, government, and advocacy sectors with the goal of building the kind of cross-sector coordination that this challenge demands. It is early-stage and still taking shape, but the collaborative structure is promising. Four project teams are currently forming and beginning their work:
Cross-Sector Scenario Planning, which is working to evaluate likely industry and project trajectories and forecast employment needs—the kind of forward-looking analysis that helps the field move from reactive to anticipatory.
Transferable Skill Mapping, which is identifying skills shared across clean energy and other industries—a critical bridge for helping workers and employers find each other across sector lines.
Statewide Employer Survey, which is working to identify the most critical workforce training and development needs required to skill, reskill, and upskill workers across clean energy subsectors.
Policy Influence, which is focused on identifying barriers—particularly for women and BIPOC individuals—and developing strategies to expand participation in the clean energy workforce.
Stratasight sits at the table alongside organizations like CEEM, DEED, WorkWell, the Minnesota State Energy Center of Excellence, CERTs, the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, Fresh Energy, the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE), Minnesota Sustainable Plastics Innovation Regional Engine (M-SPIRE), and others. Together, these organizations represent Minnesota’s most active clean energy workforce practitioners—and together, we are trying to build something more than the sum of our individual reports.
This is, to put it simply, a great deal of activity happening in a compressed window of time. But activity is not the same as alignment. And alignment is what the next phase of this work demands.
The Strategic Question We Cannot Avoid
Here is the tension at the center of all this work: Minnesota has multiple clean energy goals, and they are not the same goal.
This matters enormously for workforce planning, because how you define the goal determines how you define a “green job.” And how you define a green job determines what occupations you focus on, which training programs you support, which regions you prioritize, and which populations you recruit. Get the goal wrong—or leave it undefined—and your workforce strategy is building toward a moving target.
At Stratasight, we have spent considerable time mapping the major clean energy goals against their workforce implications. Here is what that analysis reveals:
Goal 1: 100% Carbon-Free Electricity by 2040
This is the goal we believe offers the clearest path to actionable workforce strategy—and the one that anchors Stratasight’s supply and demand report.
What makes it tractable: The occupational footprint is relatively concentrated. Electricians, lineworkers, solar and wind installers, utility technicians, electrical engineers—these are the core trades that build and maintain a carbon-free grid. Training pathways exist, apprenticeship programs are established, and the industry pipeline (utility IRPs, MISO interconnection queues, known project timelines) provides concrete anchors for demand forecasting.
Challenges: Even here, definitional clarity is required. What counts as “clean electricity” work? Does it include construction of new generation capacity only, or also grid upgrades, storage, and operations and maintenance? Regional disparities in project activity mean that workforce needs will not be evenly distributed. And timeline uncertainty—driven by federal policy shifts, permitting delays, and supply chain pressures—means that any forecast must be built on scenarios, not a single projection.
Overall assessment: High strategic leverage for workforce planning. Workforce development in key trades is genuinely essential to achieving the goal, and Stratasight and its partners are well-positioned to model it.
Goal 2: Net-Zero Economywide by 2050
This goal is vast. Net-zero touches transportation, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, industry—essentially every sector of the economy. A workforce strategy oriented around it would need to simultaneously address electric vehicle technicians, building energy auditors, agricultural conservation specialists, and industrial process engineers, among dozens of other occupational categories.
What makes it valuable: It reflects the actual scope of the transition. A net-zero economy is a transformed economy, and a workforce strategy that engages with its full complexity will ultimately be more comprehensive.
Challenges: The very breadth that makes it valuable makes it nearly impossible to operationalize for workforce planning purposes. Which sectors do you prioritize first? How do you sequence interventions across a 25-year timeline? How do you account for technological changes that have not yet occurred? The Met Council’s CCAP offers a useful illustration: even with significant resources and a sophisticated team, the workforce analysis for a regional net-zero plan acknowledges that the scope of relevant industries and occupations is vast and that growth will be uneven and volatile.
Overall assessment: Essential as a long-term North Star, but too diffuse to anchor near-term workforce strategy. This is a goal that benefits from being approached through a series of more targeted sub-goals—like the 2040 electricity goal.
Goal 3: 100,000 Clean Energy Jobs by 2030
This goal has the appeal of a clear, countable target. It is politically legible and communicable in a way that “net-zero by 2050” simply is not.
What makes it valuable: A jobs-count target focuses attention on growth and access. It can be disaggregated by region, occupation, and demographic group, making it useful for equity-focused workforce planning and pipeline development.
Challenges: The fundamental problem is definitional. What is a “clean energy job” for purposes of counting toward 100,000? CEEM’s Clean Jobs Midwest report uses one framework; the Met Council’s CCAP uses another; federal reporting uses yet another. Without a shared definition, we cannot assess progress—and the risk is that we declare success by shifting definitions rather than by actually growing the workforce.
Overall assessment: High communication value, but requires definitional consensus to be analytically useful. Best deployed in tandem with a technology- and goal-specific analysis, not as a standalone target.
Goal 4: Increasing Green Skills Prevalence in the Workforce
This is the most systemic of the four goals—and in many ways, the most foundational. The idea is straightforward: as the economy greens, the workforce needs to green with it, and that means embedding green skills into educational curricula, credentialing systems, and employer training programs across many sectors.
What makes it valuable: It captures the cross-sector, transferable-skills dimension of the clean energy transition that the other goals can miss. The ENR report found that 88% of core ENR occupational employment is shared with other career clusters—meaning that the workforce needed for clean energy is not neatly siloed. Building green skills broadly is the right long-term posture.
Challenges: Measuring skill prevalence is analytically complex. It requires moving beyond standard industry and occupational taxonomies into skills-based labor market data—exactly the kind of data that requires significant investment to develop and maintain. Without a defined target (“increase green skills prevalence by X”), it is also difficult to hold anyone accountable for progress.
Overall assessment: A necessary foundation for all other goals, but most powerful when paired with specific, measurable targets. The work being done by the Energy Table’s Transferable Skill Mapping team is directly relevant here.
Why the Choice of Goal Matters—And Why We’re Starting with Electricity
The point of this analysis is not to rank goals by importance. All four matter. Minnesota will need to make progress on all of them simultaneously.
The point is that you cannot build a useful workforce strategy without choosing a goal to organize it around. A goal determines what counts as a green job. A green job definition determines which occupations to analyze. Occupational analysis reveals which training programs are aligned and which are not. That gap analysis reveals where investment is needed. Investment decisions shape whether we close the talent gap in time.
This is not an abstract methodological point. It is the practical decision that shapes everything Stratasight produces. Our Green Jobs Talent Supply and Demand Report will be anchored in Minnesota’s 100% clean electricity by 2040 goal—for good reasons:
The occupational scope is definable and manageable. We can identify the core trades and technical occupations needed to build and operate a carbon-free grid.
Project pipeline data exists. We can anchor demand forecasts in known utility infrastructure plans, renewable energy project queues, and grid upgrade timelines—building from real construction activity rather than theoretical models alone.
The 2040 deadline creates urgency. Unlike a 2050 net-zero goal, the 2040 electricity target is close enough that workforce planning decisions made today have direct bearing on whether Minnesota hits the mark.
It can serve as a template. A rigorous supply-demand analysis anchored in the electricity goal gives us a replicable methodology we can adapt for other clean energy goals over time. The same analytical architecture—define the goal, map the occupations, model supply and demand, identify gaps, recommend levers—works across all four goals.
What We’re Building—And What We’re Learning
Stratasight is currently developing the Green Jobs Talent Supply and Demand Report, with completion anticipated in December 2026. This is not a simple task, and I want to be transparent about the methodological choices we are navigating.
Demand-side forecasting for a clean energy transition is inherently uncertain. We are exploring several approaches: a pipeline model that estimates demand directly from known or planned construction projects; a scenario model that combines pipeline data with economic multipliers across multiple futures; a technology-specific multiplier model that applies national jobs-per-megawatt ratios to Minnesota’s projected generation mix; and an occupational demand mapping approach that translates technology-specific totals into detailed occupational estimates using Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET data.
Each approach has strengths and limitations. We will likely use a hybrid—anchoring near-term estimates in project pipeline data while using scenario modeling to capture the range of possible futures. The goal is not to produce a single “correct” forecast but a set of reasoned, transparent scenarios that remain useful even as technologies and policies evolve.
On the supply side, we will analyze current labor availability, education and training program completions, and credential pipelines to produce a workforce gap assessment. This is where our ENR report—and the program market scan that follows our supply and demand analysis—will be especially valuable. We already know, for example, that the aggregate occupational unemployment rate for core ENR occupations is just 1.7%, signaling a tight market with little slack. We know which counties have the highest concentration of ENR workers. And we know where educational pathways are well-established and where gaps exist.
Critically, this work does not happen in isolation. Stratasight is actively coordinating with DEED’s CCAP workforce analysis, aligning with CEEM’s Clean Jobs Midwest data, and contributing to the Energy Table’s cross-sector scenario planning and transferable skill mapping workgroups. The goal is to build on existing work, not duplicate it—and to fill in the specific gaps that translate broad goals into actionable workforce intelligence.
What Success Looks Like
I want to close with a vision of what we are actually working toward, because it is easy to get lost in the methodological weeds.
Success, in the near term, looks like this: policymakers, educators, and workforce practitioners across Minnesota have a clear, shared understanding of what the clean electricity transition will demand of the workforce—in terms of numbers, occupations, skills, and regional distribution. They can point to specific gaps. They can identify which training programs to invest in and which partnerships to forge. They can make decisions based on evidence rather than intuition.
Success, in the medium term, looks like this: Minnesota’s education and workforce development system is genuinely aligned with the electricity transition. Training programs have been updated. Apprenticeship pipelines have been expanded. Transferable skill pathways are well-mapped, so that workers from adjacent industries can move into clean energy roles without starting from zero.
And success, in the long term, looks like this: Minnesota hits its 2040 carbon-free electricity target with a strong, diverse, well-paid workforce in place—and has built, in the process, a proven analytical model for addressing its other clean energy goals. The work done on the electricity goal becomes a template for tackling net-zero by 2050. The skills mapped in clean energy become the foundation for the broader green economy.
This is not a small ambition. What I do know is that the talent, commitment, and collaboration exist across Minnesota's clean energy community—at the Energy Table, at DEED, at CEEM, at partner organizations too numerous to list here. Whether that is enough depends on choices still ahead of us. That is precisely why the data has to lead.
The question was: are we on track? The answer, for now, is: we are building the tools to know.
About Stratasight Research and Consulting
Stratasight supports Minnesota in building a more aligned, opportunity-rich labor economy. Through rigorous research and analysis—from market dynamics to talent gaps and needs—we consult with leaders to solve our region’s biggest economic, workforce, and talent challenges. Born from RealTime Talent’s decade-long legacy of trusted analysis and collaborative leadership, Stratasight sits at the intersection of Minnesota’s workforce ecosystem, uniquely bridging policy, education, industry, and employer—translating complexity into clarity and clarity into action.
This blog series is supported by a grant from the McKnight Foundation as part of Stratasight’s Advancing Minnesota’s Green Workforce initiative.
