There has been an intense debate on the quantification of the employment effects of renewable electricity deployment in the European Union. However, most studies carried out in the past have focused on specific countries and those with a European-wide scope have not provided disaggregated results per country. Furthermore, differences between importing and exporting countries have not been considered. This paper aims to cover those gaps. It presents a novel methodology which integrates the aforementioned considerations in order to calculate the employment effects of renewable energy deployment. The methodology is useful to calculate dynamic employment factors (considering technology learning effects) and the specific capacity (based on trade effects) to which these factors should be applied. It is applied to three renewable energy technologies – photovoltaics, wind on-shore and wind off-shore- in the European Union Member States in the 2008–2012 period. The results using this novel methodology broadly confirm the figures provided in other contributions in the literature. The proposed methodology can be instrumental in assessing the socio-economic effects of policies and investment programmes targeting the deployment of renewable energy technologies.

Peer reviewed