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By Brian Eckhouse and David Wethe (Bloomberg) \u2013Jeff Bishop\u2019s LinkedIn post gets right to the point: \u201cHouston Oil & Gas Folks \u2014 we\u2019re hiring in Texas\u201d for jobs in clean tech.<\/p>\n
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His company, battery developer Key Capture Energy, is making the pitch even as tens of thousands of renewable-energy jobs have dried up amid the coronavirus pandemic. That\u2019s because Bishop and a handful of other clean-power executives see an opportunity to recruit talent from the oil and gas industries, which have been even harder hit.<\/p>\n
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While there are plenty of overlapping skills, it wasn\u2019t always easy for clean-power companies to lure top talent from oil and gas. Wind and solar were young and niche industries that tended to attract environmentalists. Now they\u2019re big energy, and they appeal to a wider class of workers. Since publishing the post two months ago, Bishop has received about 200 applications.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe\u2019ve always wanted oil and gas folks,\u201d said Bishop, Key Capture\u2019s chief executive officer.<\/p>\n
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When boiled down, much of oil, gas, wind and solar is about building projects and selling the output. That requires workers with backgrounds in geology, land acquisition, engineering, finance, asset management and energy contracts.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe are hiring oil and gas refugees for sure,\u201d said Christian Fong, CEO at Spruce Finance Inc. The solar company moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Houston two years ago to recruit more energy veterans. It plans to boost its staff by 30%, or 20 people, during the second and third quarters.<\/p>\n
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Clean power already has momentum in Texas. It\u2019s long been the top wind-power state in the U.S. Solar has been booming. Houston plans to power all of its city-owned properties \u2014 from fire stations to airports \u2014 with renewable energy. And now the city\u2019s mayor is trying to bring two Elon Musk companies to the city \u2014 Tesla Inc. and SpaceX \u2014 in his push to broaden the city\u2019s economic base beyond oil.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe\u2019re having to make certain adjustments,\u201d Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said. \u201cIt\u2019s about energy transition.\u201d<\/p>\n
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To be clear, clean-power companies aren\u2019t even close to being in position to absorb the nearly 90,000 fossil-fuel jobs shed in March and April, including drillers, frackers and refiners. Renewables companies shed nearly 96,000 of their own jobs during that period as lockdowns put rooftop solar installations and other larger projects on ice.<\/p>\n
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But while some furloughed clean-power workers are already being called back to work, the pain in the oil patch continues as the industry suffers its worst downturn ever as the pandemic cripples demand.<\/p>\n
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