Energy Publications

This paper explores the extent to which this emerging green economy can offer a pathway out of poverty for low-income young people, many of whom have disengaged from school and are struggling to find a way into the economic mainstream. These disconnected youth — some six million strong — represent an untapped resource. Despite the fact that they have experienced difficulties in their personal lives or communities and may not have completed high school, many seek a second chance, returning to programs such as Service and Conservation Corps or other education and work initiatives in their local communities. The Corps Network and several partners — including COWS, Green For All, The Academy for Educational Development (AED), Workforce Strategy Center and Living Cities — guided the development of the paper with additional support from numerous stakeholders.

Two years of discussion and research since COWS and partners released Greener Pathways: Jobs and Workforce Development in the Clean Energy Economy, we’ve concluded that developing a comprehensive, comprehensible map of “green” credentials is virtually impossible. And that impossibility motivates our interest in moving toward a more coherent national system. Greener Skills, our follow up to Greener Pathways, outlines an American skills agenda and calls for a better, stronger, greener workforce system to support it.

Mapping Green Career Pathways: Job Training Infrastructure and Opportunities in Wisconsin outlines key components of the state’s workforce development systems – including but not limited to apprenticeship and technical college pathways – that could be aligned and expanded to support an emerging clean energy sector.

Held October 29, 2009, in Madison, Wisconsin, this publication provides a brief summary of the discussion and findings of the Women, Jobs and Wisconsin’s Green Economy Public Policy Roundtable. COWS was a key participant and the Proceedings document many of our views on the Green Economy.

A Short Guide to Setting Up a City-Scale Retrofit Program, co-authored by Green For All and COWS, provides a model for designing and implementing weatherization and retrofitting programs on a citywide scale, with a goal of making these retrofits available to more households and providing good, entry-level jobs with career pathways.

Greening Wisconsin’s Workforce: Training, Recovery, and the Clean Energy Economy tackles the question of how Wisconsin can best pursue the greener and more equitable promise of the clean energy economy. It looks at how the state can use Recovery Act dollars and a first-rate technical college system to ensure that the emerging green economy benefits Wisconsin’s working families.

The Wisconsin Apollo Alliance is asking the Joint Finance Committee of the Wisconsin Legislature to take bold steps to move Wisconsin into the clean energy economy.  In a letter to the committee, it asks legislators to amend the Energy Independence Fund, so that at least a percentage of that fund must be used to build renewable energy supply chains in Wisconsin.

This report, based on joint work by COWS (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and the Powell Center for Construction & Environment (University of Florida), suggests a way to get at least policy-level answers to the question of what kinds of jobs result from investment in building energy efficiency (EE). Program designers, armed with better knowledge of the building stock, energy costs, specific EE measures likely to be supported, and other local data, will be able to provide much more robust estimates as they move toward program implementation.