Clean Energy Is Now As Big As Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in the US - by David Roberts

With $200 billion in revenue, it’s sneaking up on consumer electronics.

Across the world, myriad efforts are underway to make energy systems cleaner, smarter, and more efficient.

But it’s hard to get a sense of the total size of those efforts, as they are spread across so many different industries and regions.

One organization that has given this quite a bit of thought is Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), a national trade association of businesses working on cleaner and smarter energy.
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Globally, advanced energy is growing spectacularly fast
Globally, advanced energy brought in $1.4 trillion in revenue last year, which is, the report says, “nearly twice the size of the airline industry, equal to apparel, and close to global spending on media, from newspapers to movies to video games...”

What’s more, the advanced energy industry is growing much faster than the world economy overall (7 percent vs. 3.1 percent).

Advanced energy now supports 3.3 million jobs in the US
In the US, the story is much the same:  The advanced energy industry is big!

As of last year, it brought in $200 billion in revenue, which is “nearly double beer sales, equal to domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing, and approaching wholesale consumer electronics.” That’s up 28 percent since 2010.  The industry now supports 3.3 million jobs in the US.

If you factor out ethanol, which has taken a big hit in the past year, the industry is growing much more rapidly than the national economy.

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