Power industry: More than 2.5 million jobs
Paul J. Allen is a senior vice president at M.J. Bradley & Associates LLC. Prior to joining MJB&A, Allen was a corporate officer at Constellation Energy in Baltimore, Maryland, where he served on the management committee for eleven years as senior vice president for corporate affairs and chief environmental officer.
We talked with Paul J. Allen, a senior vice president at M.J. Bradley & Associates LLC, about his firm's report Powering America, published August 3, 2017.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Tell us about your research on the economic importance of the electric power industry.
Paul Allen: This is the most comprehensive study that's been done on the full dimension of jobs, employment and the broad economic impact of the electric power industry. It shows what some of us in the industry have felt, but hadn't yet seen so thoroughly quantified. The electric power industry constitutes what I like to call the first five percent of the American economy.
Virtually every other sector of the economy depends to a significant degree on the safe, reliable, affordable, environmentally sustainable provision of electricity. Every other industry in the economy depends to a meaningful degree on the women and men of the electricity industry who make it happen. It's important that people understand that the electricity industry is not just four hundred and ninety-one thousand people. It is much bigger than that.
The jobs directly provided by the electric power industry are more like over two and half million, plus an induced effect that reaches the total to over seven million jobs supported by the electric power industry.