Must love heights and live wires: How Canada is building a workforce for the energy transition

Shane Mullins cranks his neck backwards to see the top of the wind turbine he’s about to climb – a tower specifically for training. While it’s not as tall as the structures that run beside roads and stand parallel in fields, it’s inarguably high. It hits the same altitude as a 10-storey building, about half the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Along with his classmates, Mullins takes turns scaling the turbine, but he’s not scared. This kind of adrenaline rush is just his thing — he likes “climbing stuff” — and his last job was at a gravestone factory, a "morbid job," he explains. He is not easily frightened.

Mullins sees his training as a wind technician as a move that aligns with his ethics, interests and hopes for a secure future. 

“I picture myself in my 50s paying $5 for a fill-up at the station on electric. I think the world needs it. Working slowly towards being a part of that is really nice,” he says, now 22 years old.

“I think the industry is gonna grow exponentially…I'm just looking forward to that future.”

As one of a dozen students in the wind turbine training program at Holland College on Prince Edward Island, Mullins will graduate in the spring with all the fundamentals needed to enter the wind turbine industry. He will understand the electrical and hydraulic aspects of wind turbines, the science behind how they work, and acquire more general trade certifications, such as fall protection and confined space awareness (how to work safely in tight quarters). 

Mullins is part of a small but growing vanguard of workers being trained to build, operate and maintain clean energy sources across Canada. As the country moves from polluting energy sources like oil, gas and coal, and toward clean alternatives like wind and solar, the monumental shift – which is essential to Canada meeting its climate targets – will require workers, and lots of them. 

The new jobs will cover a slew of sectors: construction workers building energy-efficient buildings; people working on electric vehicle assembly lines; and drill operators at geothermal plants. In a net-zero by 2050 Canada, 700,000 more energy jobs will exist than today, according to a 2023 report by Clean Energy Canada. In the wind sector alone, the Global Wind Energy Council estimates that over half a million new wind technicians will be required worldwide by 2026. 

Those jobs will crop up gradually, explains Noel Baldwin, executive director of the Future Skills Centre. He says more data leading up to 2050 is needed to map out the nearer-future picture of the green jobs industry. 

But even so, “we're not positioned to be able to do all of this yet, and we need to kind of act now,” he says.

There are plenty of programs in Canadian colleges and Universities working to train the future workforce in these sectors. Examples include Lethbridge College in Alberta, which offers a one-year program for wind technicians; Ace Community College in British Columbia, which has a five-week program for solar; and more general certifications such as Fanshawe College’s two-year renewable energies technician program in Ontario. This year, Toronto's George Brown College launched a program with a 3D wind training turbine. However, unlike the career path of an electrician, there is no red seal or industry-wide certification that a worker needs to enter the wind or solar industry. Often, electricians can get jobs at solar companies that provide training.

Even with the existing patchwork of offerings, Luisa Da Silva, executive director at not-for-profit Iron and Earth, notes that “there just isn’t enough people that have the skills to work in the (renewables) sector, and there’s a variety of reasons for that.”

“It might be that they face barriers to entry, or it might be that they don’t even know what jobs are available to them.”

Baldwin agrees. “It's not new news that it's been harder to bring people into the trades,” adding that multiple sectors and businesses – from expanding hydro to EV manufacturing and new power plants – are likely looking to poach from the same pool of skilled workers.

“I do think that there is sometimes a bit of a tendency to kind of take for granted that the labour market is just going to sort itself out. I think that that can turn into complacency that could represent a real risk,” he said. 

“There's likely to be a lot of pressure in a number of different areas for people with the same kind of skill sets: that risk of just robbing Peter to pay Paul, I think is present and, and we should be paying attention to that.”

New opportunities in renewables come as oil and gas jobs are on the decline. The just transition movement wants those workers to reap the benefits, rather than be left high and dry in dying industries. A 2021 report from the Centre for Future Work notes direct employment in the fossil fuel sector is about one per cent of total employment countrywide, at around 170,000 jobs. Since 2014, jobs in the industry have been significantly declining, the report finds.

The role of wind and solar

The federal government aims to achieve a non-emitting electricity grid by 2035, and has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. To meet the increased energy demand and swell of renewables required to meet Canada’s climate targets, the majority of new generation must come from wind and solar, according to the Canadian Climate Institute. 

Along with the programs and training offered by post-secondary institutions and companies, Iron and Earth runs a renewable skills training program that aims to help Indigenous communities and fossil fuel workers gain the skills to work in renewable energy.

They have both a solar and wind training program that run about two weeks. Students spend the first half in a classroom and then receive some hands-on training in either solar or wind, explains Da Silva.

They also have individual courses – one that introduces students to solar systems and lasts for a few days.

“This was designed very much in response to what we were hearing from communities, which is that sometimes being able to dedicate two weeks is a bit of a commitment for some people, particularly from marginalized, vulnerable, racialized communities,” Da Silva said.

“So we condensed it down to about two to three days, and this is meant to be more of a start to have people see, touch, feel, getting involved, being in that conversation and understanding what jobs are available to them.”

Wind Power

While the solar industry has multiple pathways to entry, working with wind turbines has a different set of safety concerns. Education through a post-secondary institution makes a prospective worker especially employable in the industry, explains Craig Roche, program manager at Holland College. 

People still get hired in the wind sector without prior certification “because the demand is just so high,” explains Roche, but still, “the whole wind industry would rather hire someone from here because they have way more experience.”

And while students in the program are keen, Roche said enrollment is “pretty flat” in both the wind program and the school’s energy systems program (which includes solar training, as well as information on geothermal, biomass, biofuel, and energy efficiency in buildings). The programs are operating at or near capacity, but their application lists aren’t long. 

“It's a little underwhelming, I would expect that with all the talk about climate change and decarbonization, that those programs don't get a little bit more interest than they are getting,” he said. 

The school is located in Summerside, P.E.I., which has its own municipal utility, unlike other cities and towns in the province. It’s powered partly by wind and solar, but there are only four turbines, so few local jobs, explains Roche.

Graduates from the program (who are mostly from the Maritimes) will travel elsewhere to work, far away from P.E.I. or Nova Scotia, which still generates 37 per cent of its power from coal. 

Workers leaving their home provinces to find jobs in renewable energy mirrors a longstanding trend in the region, which also saw workers leave home to work in the oil sands. 

Students will have better luck finding jobs in other provinces. The largest wind farm in Canada is Black Spring Ridge in Alberta at 166 wind turbines. Ontario has the most installed wind and solar capacity at 5,536 and 2,819 megawatts, respectively.

For Ibrahim Shakir, moving to Alberta to work in wind is the goal. His brother lives in P.E.I, but he moved from Ontario for the program. He finds comfort in a future where he travels for work, where wind is everywhere and workers are needed from Nova Scotia to Australia.

Up on the training turbine, he can see the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a warm October day, but gets colder the higher he climbs. Like Mullins, he is unafraid of the height – he was a residential window cleaner at his past job.

About an hour's drive down Route 2 – a two-lane highway sandwiched between old churches, small cemeteries and sprawling fields – students are at Holland College’s other campus in Charlottetown, installing solar panels on waist-high roofs built for training. They pass each other wrenches and heft panels up together, wearing hard hats and gloves.

The green workers of tomorrow are enrolled in the college’s energy systems program. Solar is just one part of it, but it’s the focus for 20-year-old Elijah Curusa. He spent his childhood in Rwanda, attended high school in Utah, and moved to the Atlantic region to be closer to his sister and attend college. 

For him, the long-term goal is to return to Rwanda and start a solar company after working in Halifax for a couple of years. While the small country’s access to electricity is increasing, Curusa sees solar as an opportunity for the 25 per cent of households still without electricity.

Student Jasmine Pake, who is 29, hopes she will find a job in P.E.I, which wants to become the country’s first net-zero-emissions province by 2040. Her favourite part of the program has been the energy auditing portion, which teaches students how to analyze how much energy is used by a building, and how to make structures more energy-efficient. 

“I didn't even really know about energy auditing before I took the program,” adds Pake’s classmate, 26-year-old Riley Hardy. 

“And then, once I learned about it, it's like, yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I want to do. It helps the planet and everything, but you're also helping the individual.”

Pake and Hardy stand on the lawn of the college with their classmate Bradley Keus, who is 24. All three are in the second and final year of the program, and will graduate in the spring. 

Keus nods in agreement about the energy auditing portion of the program. It’s his favourite too, but says a multitude of job options exists in the renewable energy industry just waiting for graduates. 

“There's a lot of talk about moving away from fossil fuels, moving more toward renewables. ...It's just something that is gonna have to be done,” he said.

“And I kind of want to be part of it.”

With files from Kathryn Fraser