September 07, 2026

The Workers Powering the Midwest’s Clean Energy Future

This Labor Day, we celebrate the electricians, technicians, line workers, manufacturers, and tradespeople building the Midwest's clean energy future.

By Tom McFeeley, Media Relations Specialist

Labor Day celebrates working people as we pause to give them a moment of recognition. This year that includes the more than 665,000 people across ELPC’s nine-state Midwest footprint who spend their days building, installing, manufacturing, and maintaining the clean energy systems the region increasingly runs on. That’s the electrician wiring a battery storage system outside Grand Rapids, the line worker upgrading a substation in rural Iowa, and the technician on an assembly line in Ohio building parts for an EV. Clean energy work in the Midwest looks less like a coastal tech industry and more like a skilled trade, because that’s largely what it is.

According to the 2025 Clean Jobs Midwest report from E2 and Evergreen Climate Innovations, clean energy and clean vehicle companies employed 774,838 people across the broader Midwest in 2024, a new record. Within ELPC’s nine states, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, that adds up to roughly 665,600 jobs. In every one of those states, clean energy jobs grew faster last year than the state’s overall economy, in several cases multiple times faster.

What the work actually looks like

“Clean energy jobs” can sound abstract, so it helps to describe what people in this sector spend their day doing.

About two out of every three of these jobs sit in energy efficiency: manufacturing ENERGY STAR-rated appliances, installing efficient lighting, connecting heat pumps and other high-efficiency HVAC systems, and constructing buildings with materials like low-carbon concrete. That is the largest single piece of the clean energy workforce in every ELPC state.

Most of the rest splits between clean vehicles, roughly 112,000 workers across the nine states building and servicing EVs, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles, and a smaller but faster-growing group in renewable generation and grid and storage: solar and wind installation and maintenance, battery storage, and smart grid modernization. Battery storage and smart grid jobs grew in every ELPC state last year, a sign of where the industry is headed next.

A State-by-state picture

Scale varies widely across the region, which is part of the point. This is not a coastal industry that happens to touch the Midwest. It is a Midwest industry, built state by state.

Here’s how that breaks down by state, per Clean Jobs Midwest:

• Illinois: 132,239 jobs, up 2.5 percent
• Michigan: 127,771 jobs
• Ohio: 121,097 jobs, up 1.5 percent
• Indiana: 90,015 jobs
• Wisconsin: 75,034 jobs, up 1.8 percent
• Minnesota: 63,802 jobs, up 2.6 percent
• Iowa: 33,610 jobs, up 2.8 percent
• South Dakota: 12,546 jobs
• North Dakota: 9,513 jobs, up 3.3 percent

Eight of ELPC’s nine states set new clean energy employment records in 2024. Wisconsin, the exception, still added more than 1,350 jobs last year and now employs over 75,000 people in the sector.

State policy helps explain some of that variation. Illinois and Michigan, both of which have set 100 percent clean energy targets in state law, sit at or near the top of the list. States without a comparable statewide target, like Indiana and Ohio, still post substantial numbers, but grow more slowly and remain more exposed when federal incentives shrink.

Small Business and Veterans

Two features of this workforce are worth highlighting on a day built around workers specifically.

This is a small-business industry. Across ELPC’s states, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of clean energy businesses employ fewer than 20 people, from 64 percent in South Dakota to 74 percent in Iowa and Michigan. Most of this work is not happening inside huge multinational operations. It is local contractors, manufacturers, and installers.

Veterans are also overrepresented in clean energy work relative to the broader labor force. Across the nine states, veterans made up between 9.7 percent, in Illinois, and 12.3 percent, in Indiana, of the clean energy workforce in 2024, well above their roughly 4 percent share of the workforce nationally.

Why this matters right now 

This growth is not guaranteed to continue. Before the federal tax and spending law that Congress passed in 2025, the Midwest was on track for clean energy job growth of nearly 6 percent in 2025 alone. That law winds down long-standing incentives for wind, solar, EVs, and energy efficiency, and E2’s tracking already shows more than $22 billion in canceled or scaled-back clean energy projects nationally as a result. State policy, not just federal policy, will increasingly decide whether Midwest clean energy jobs keep growing or start to stall.

It also matters because of where this growth is headed next. The same grid these workers are building out is the one that will need to absorb a wave of new data center demand across the Midwest, a subject we start digging into next Monday, when Clean Energy Week opens and we launch a new blog series: Deconstructing Data Centers.

Figures in this piece are drawn from the 2025 Clean Jobs Midwest report, produced by E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs) and Evergreen Climate Innovations. Read the full report at cleanjobsmidwest.com.