Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.

DECATUR, ILLINOIS — A fistfight at a high school football game nearly defined Shawn Honorable’s life.

It was 1999 when he and a group of teen boys were expelled and faced criminal charges over the incident. The story of the ​“Decatur Seven” drew national headlines and protests led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who framed their harsh treatment as blatant racism. The governor eventually intervened, and the students were allowed to attend alternative schools.

Honorable, now 41, was encouraged by support ​“from around the world,” but he said the incident was traumatizing and he continued to struggle academically and socially. Over the years, he dabbled in illegal activity and was incarcerated, most recently after a 2017 conviction for accepting a large amount of marijuana sent through the mail.

Today, Honorable is ready to start a new chapter, having graduated with honors last week from a clean energy workforce training program at Richland Community College, located in the Central Illinois city of Decatur. He would eventually like to own or manage a solar company, but he has more immediate plans to start a solar-powered mobile hot dog stand. He’s already chosen the name: Buns on the Run.

“By me going back to school and doing this, it shows my nephews and my little cousins and nieces that it is good to have education,” Honorable said. ​“I know this is going to be the new way of life with solar panels. So I’ll have a step up on everyone. When it comes, I will already be aware of what’s going on with this clean energy thing.”

After decades of layoffs and factory closings, the community of Decatur is also looking to clean energy as a potential springboard. 

Located amid soybean fields a three-hour drive from Chicago, the city was long known for its Caterpillar, Firestone Tire, and massive corn-syrup factories. Industrial jobs have been in decline for decades, though, and high rates of gun violence, child poverty, unemployment, and incarceration were among the reasons the city was named a clean energy workforce hub funded under Illinois’ 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA).

Decatur’s hub, based at Richland Community College, is arguably the most developed and successful of the dozen or so established statewide. That’s thanks in part to TCCI Manufacturing, a local, family-owned factory that makes electric vehicle compressors. TCCI is expanding its operations with a state-of-the-art testing facility and an on-site campus where Richland students will take classes adjacent to the manufacturing floor. The electric truck company Rivian also has a factory 50 miles away. 

“The pieces are all coming together,” Kara Demirjian, senior vice president of TCCI Manufacturing, said by email. ​“What makes this region unique is that it’s not just about one company or one product line. It’s about building an entire clean energy ecosystem. The future of EV manufacturing leadership won’t just be on the coasts — it’s being built right here in the Midwest.”

The Decatur CEJA program has also flourished because it was grafted onto a preexisting initiative, EnRich, that helps formerly incarcerated or otherwise disenfranchised people gain new skills and employment. The program is overseen by the Rev. Courtney Carson, a childhood friend of Honorable and another member of the Decatur Seven.

“So many of us suffer significantly from our unmet needs, our unhealed traumas,” said Carson, who was jailed as a young man for gun possession and later drag racing. With the help of mentors including Rev. Jackson and a college basketball coach, he parlayed his past into leadership, becoming associate pastor at a renowned church, leading a highway construction class at Richland, and in 2017 being elected to the same school board that had expelled him.

Carson, now vice president of external relations at the community college, tapped his own experience to shape EnRich as a trauma-informed approach, with wraparound services to help students overcome barriers — from lack of childcare to PTSD to a criminal record. Carson has faith that students can overcome such challenges to build more promising futures, like Decatur itself has done. 

“We have all these new opportunities coming in, and there’s a lot of excitement in the city,” Carson said. ​“That’s magnificent. So what has to happen is these individuals who suffered from closures, they have to be reminded that there is hope.” 

Getting students ready for the clean energy workforce

Richland Community College’s clean energy jobs training starts with an eight-week life skills course that has long been central to the larger EnRich program. The course uses a Circle of Courage practice inspired by Indigenous communities and helps students prepare to handle stressful workplace situations like being disrespected or even called a racial slur.

“Being called the N-word, couldn’t that make you want to fight somebody? But now you lose your job,” said Carson. ​“We really dive deep into what’s motivating their attitude and those traumas that have significantly impacted their body to make them respond to situations either the right way or the wrong way.”

The training addresses other dynamics that might be unfamiliar to some students — for example, some male students might not be prepared to be supervised by a woman, Carson noted, or others might not be comfortable with LGBTQ+ coworkers.

Life skills are followed by a construction math course crucial to many clean energy and other trades jobs. During a recent class, 24-year-old Brylan Hodges joked with the teacher while converting fractions to decimals and percentages on the whiteboard. He explained that he moved from St. Louis to Decatur in search of opportunity, and he hopes to become a property manager overseeing solar panel installation and energy-efficiency upgrades on buildings.

Students take an eight-hour primer in clean energy fields including electric vehicles, solar, HVAC, and home energy auditing. Then they choose a clean energy track to pursue, leading to professional certifications as well as a chance to continue at Richland for an associate degree. Under the state-funded program, students are paid for their time attending classes.

Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.

MITCHELL, S.D. — Matthew Pearson found a successful career in the wind energy industry purely by chance.

After graduating from high school in Vermillion, Pearson knew he didn’t want to pursue a four-year degree and instead scrolled through the list of majors offered at Mitchell Tech, one of the state’s four technical colleges.

“When I came to the wind energy program, I thought, ​‘Well, that sounds kind of cool,’” Pearson, 28, recalled during a recent interview at Mitchell Tech, the only South Dakota college with a designated wind energy major.

He didn’t know it at the time, but he had stumbled into one of the fastest-growing, highest-paying trade fields in the state and nation.

While workforce shortages plague many industries and employers in the Rushmore State, great opportunities abound for skilled workers to build, operate, and maintain renewable energy facilities, including at wind farms. Meanwhile, strong partnerships between technical colleges, employers, and the Build Dakota scholarship program have forged a ready pathway to quickly and effectively fill the need for energy workers.

Pearson obtained a Build Dakota scholarship that paid all tuition for a two-year wind technology degree, then spent about $15,000 to complete another two-year major in electrical construction. 

After graduation, he quickly landed a job wiring wind towers at locations around the country. He was initially paid about $80,000 a year, and after six years was making $127,000 plus a daily living fee of $140.

But now, with a fiancee and two children, Pearson is completing a circle by leaving fieldwork and returning to Mitchell Tech to become its only wind energy program instructor. 

Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.

When Mason Taylor was getting ready to graduate from high school in 2022, he thought he would have to take an entry-level technician job with a company in Tennessee.

Taylor grew up in the town of Dryden in rural Lee County, in the westernmost sliver of Virginia between Kentucky and Tennessee. He had come to love the electrical courses he took in high school because there was always something new to learn, always a new way to challenge himself. 

Driving to Tennessee for work would likely mean two hours commuting each day.

Taylor, now 21, just wanted to work close to home. 

A summer apprenticeship learning how to install solar arrays helped him get on-the-job training and opened up connections to local work.

A regional partnership working to add solar panels to commercial buildings in the region aims to train young people as they go, developing workforce skills in anticipation of increasing demand for renewable energy-focused jobs in the heart of coal country, where skill sets and energy options are both changing. 

Virginia ranks eighth in the nation for installed solar capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, but so far, major renewable energy projects have been clustered in the eastern and southern regions of the state. Increasing the popularity of solar power in the far southwestern corner of the state depends in part on the availability of trained workers like Taylor.

Andy Hershberger, director of Virginia operations for Got Electric, said the electrical contractor firm has had an apprenticeship program nearly since the company’s founding. 

The company, which has about 100 employees total, with 40 in Virginia and an office in Maryland, has worked with Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures, a commercial and public-sector solar developer, as far back as 2012. 

More recently, the two companies began working to set up a training program that was more focused on solar. The catalyst was the former superintendent of Wise County schools, a school division that had signed up to put solar panels on its facilities. The superintendent saw the installation as an opportunity to get his students hands-on work on a renewable energy project.

Approximately three dozen apprentices have signed up for the program since 2022, including about 13 who are currently involved, Hershberger said. They work on a variety of solar projects, including on rooftops, carports, and ground-mounted installations. 

“We have been utilizing this program to train students coming out of high school and basically growing the workforce side of this thing, so we have the necessary personnel to build these solar projects long term,” Hershberger said.

On top of hourly pay, apprentices get free equipment and a transportation subsidy, along with nine community college credits at Mountain Empire Community College, which provides classroom training before students step onto the job site. 

“I mean, pretty much everything you need to know to go out and do any electrical job, you pretty much learned in that apprenticeship program,” Taylor said.

He was in the first cohort of 10 students who installed solar panels on public schools in Lee and Wise counties in 2022. A grant from a regional economic development authority paid the students’ wages while they earned credit at Mountain Empire Community College, which serves residents of Dickenson, Lee, Scott, and Wise counties, plus the city of Norton.

He got a job offer from Got Electric at the end of that summer. 

This summer, Secure Solar Futures and Got Electric will join forces again to install more than 1,600 solar panels on the community college’s classroom buildings. The project was originally slated for 2024 but was delayed due in part to a separate project upgrading fire safety equipment in one of the buildings.

The 777-kilowatt solar power system will be connected to the electric grid, and Mountain Empire will receive credit for the power it generates.

Hershberger said he sees interest in solar growing.

“I think there’s always been folks that have adopted renewable projects, different types of energy sources. There’s always the standard interest in trying to save money for facilities and campuses and things like that,” he said.

Mountain Empire Community College offers solar training as a standalone career studies certificate or as part of its larger energy technology associate degree program.

In Southwest Virginia, a solar installation project is more likely to consist of adding panels to homes and businesses rather than building the large, utility-scale ground-based facilities more commonly seen in Southside Virginia, said Matt Rose, the college’s dean of industrial technology.

On a larger project, a single worker might have a specialized role, performing the same task across a large number of panels. On a smaller project, a worker is more likely to be involved in more aspects of the job.

“Our students need to have that comprehensive understanding and ability to be able to do it all,” he said.

Last year, 10 students graduated Mountain Empire with the solar installer certification. Many students who earn the certification perform solar installation work as one part of a more comprehensive job, such as being an electrician.

Rose said the college’s students typically start out making $17 or $18 an hour but can earn more as they become journeymen and master electricians. 

Nationwide, the median salary for electricians is about $61,000.

In Lee County, population 22,000, the median household income is about $42,000.

The number of solar installers in Southwest Virginia is unclear. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t collect data on employment by technology, so residential solar installation companies are labeled as electrical contractors, along with all other electrical businesses, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Tony Smith, founder and CEO of Secure Solar Futures, measures the success of the company’s apprenticeship program person by person. At an April event to celebrate the completion of the first phase of solar panel installation for Roanoke schools, Smith asked about several of the students from the 2022 cohort from Lee and Wise counties by name. 

Smith said it’s tough to replicate the apprenticeship program at various school divisions. Doing so requires the work of individual school systems and the regional community colleges, instead of being able to pick up the curriculum from one area and apply it at the next project site.

And all the partners — Smith’s company, participating schools and installation firms — face some uncertainty for each project. It’s challenging to pinpoint the timing of projects so that students have the time to participate during the summer months, he said.

Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.

A plan to nearly double the amount of electricity drawn from naturally occurring heat deep below Mendocino and Sonoma counties could create thousands of new jobs in the region.

The Sonoma-Mendocino GeoZone project still faces a long list of legal, regulatory, and financial hurdles before construction, but the developer is already thinking ahead to hiring.

Sonoma Clean Power CEO Geof Syphers said the not-for-profit power producer is committed to hiring local workers for at least 30% of the jobs it creates. Meeting that goal, he said, will depend on building partnerships with local education and workforce development programs, along with a long-term commitment from California to streamline geothermal energy.

“We’ve been building partnerships with schools and trades and landowners and public officials, permitting agencies,” Syphers said. ​“But what really needs to happen before the permitting phase begins is we have to change state laws.”

Clean energy makes up a small but growing slice of Mendocino County’s employment, accounting for just under 600 jobs in 2023, according to an analysis of federal data by the nonprofit Environmental Entrepreneurs, which advocates for state and local policies benefiting the environment and economic interests.

Mendocino County workforce and education officials are taking note, gradually ramping up programs to train students to weatherize buildings, install and maintain solar projects, and take on other related construction roles.

Noel Woodhouse, an instructor who runs Mendocino College’s sustainable construction and energy technology program, said the program has already evolved since launching in 2011 and will continue to do so. He’s confident that his students’ skills in cleantech, solar, and sustainable building would easily transfer to geothermal construction — especially since the non-credit certificate program could rapidly train a large number of students in a short time. 

“Our students come out of our program with experience in heavy equipment machinery and ready workers for that type of project,” Woodhouse said. 

Powering Rural Futures: Clean energy is creating new jobs in rural America, generating opportunities for people who install solar panels, build wind turbines, weatherize homes, and more. This five-part series from the Rural News Network explores how industry, state governments, and education systems are training this growing workforce.

The sputtered drone of a vacuum pump filled the former milking barn that now houses Kennebec Valley Community College’s heat pump lab. Instructor Dave Whittemore, who held the yellow vacuum in one hand and displayed an app tracking atmospheric pressure on his phone in the other, explained in a raised voice how to do an ​“evacuation,” ridding the heat pump of air and moisture to avoid malfunctions down the road. 

“The longevity of the equipment is important,” said Whittemore, who teaches students how to install the increasingly popular electric heating and cooling units. ​“If it’s not done right, then it’s going to fail prematurely. And that’s the biggest reason that I personally try to keep up with industry best standards and I pass that on to my students.”

Six years ago, Gov. Janet Mills traveled to the college to sign a bill aimed at transforming Maine’s market for heat pumps, an environmentally friendly alternative to oil furnaces and gas boilers, and set a goal of installing 100,000 units by 2025.

The state, now a national leader for heat pump adoption, met that goal two years ahead of schedule, and Mills once again traveled to the rural Somerset County campus to announce a new target: another 175,000 heat pumps by 2027. 

Maine needs skilled workers to reach this goal, demanding training initiatives from all corners of the state to build HVAC, refrigerant, and electrical knowledge in the clean energy workforce. Without a strong pipeline, the state risks delays in reaching its heat pump target, putting its climate goals at risk.

So far, rural counties have seen some of the fastest rates of clean energy worker growth, according to state data. In Somerset County, where KVCC is located, the number of clean energy workers has grown by 44% since 2020.

As part of this push, the community college launched a high-tech heat pump training lab in 2021 and has trained over 300 students. The initiative is one of many clean energy programs the school offers as part of a broader, state-supported effort to meet Maine’s goal of reaching 30,000 clean energy jobs by 2030.