An Invisible Frontier

The greatest obstacle for the energy transition is not production or hard physical constraints—it is the skilled labour needed to transform our infrastructure and economy.

Depending who you ask, the single biggest frontier of Europe’s climate transition is likely to be one of: access to a critical raw material; a lack of public, private and/or blended finance; interconnected grids; too much public ownership; too little public ownership; sluggish planning approval; water scarcity; rising energy demand from AI; energy poverty; urbanization; deruralization; corruption; regulatory uncertainty; the rise of the far right; agriculture; China; short-termism; biodiversity loss; the absence of citizens assemblies; or either a lack of or too many wolves. Nearly all of these are significant. Many represent real physical limitations to the energy transition. All will require difficult decisions. But underpinning every one of them, and yet largely ignored, is the ability to source workers with the skills to address the challenges we will confront in the coming decades.[1] 

The shortage of skilled workers for the energy transition is acute across the world, but in Europe its impacts are particularly stark, demanding the urgent empowerment of bottom-up change led by workers.[2] Where certain countries like China have political systems that have allowed for the relatively rapid and effective pivot of industrial and education policy, intervening in the complex terrain of politics in Europe is far more difficult. At present, of the 44 countries on the continent, only Spain, Norway, Denmark, Iceland , Lithuania and the UK (yes, the UK, although it is easy to forget) have at least nominally social democratic governments, making it more reasonable to expect some degree of public planning and support for the industries central to the energy transition. As of late 2023, however, and the last comprehensive review of the 27 EU national plans to address the energy transition, only Spain had put in place a new dedicated strategic and institutional framework for fairly addressing the transition’s employment aspects.