economy To faster change

Pew partnered with Collaborative Economics, Inc., a public policy research firm based
in California, on the research. While organizations on both sides of the political spectrum have weighed in with forecasts and economic modeling to estimate the size of the clean energy economy, Pew’s analysis is the first of its kind to count actual jobs, businesses and investments for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Our numbers are conservative and may be lower than some other reports for three reasons: First, we developed a stringent definition of the clean energy economy; second, we used a new, labor-intensive methodology that counted only companies that we could verify online
as being actively engaged in the clean energy economy; and third, we counted businesses and jobs supplying products and services generated by the clean energy economy,
not the companies using these products and services to make themselves “greener” (i.e.,
we counted only companies and jobs on the supply side, not the demand side, of the
clean energy economy).
Policy makers, business leaders and the
public need credible, reliable data to ground their policy deliberations and choices, and
to understand where emerging economic opportunities lie. They also need a clear, concrete and common definition of what constitutes the clean energy economy so they can track jobs and businesses and gauge the effectiveness of public policy choices and investments.