Preparing a workforce to deliver clean energy to New York City buildings

After a lunch break, a group of 15 students break into small groups at a Long Island City work­shop to begin their next activity: Wiring a light bulb to a light switch. The switch is attached to a wooden house-like struc­ture that the students built at the start of their training in March. By the end of eight weeks, they will have installed solar panels and an elec­tric heat pump onto the structure. 

The students are enrolled in New York City Housing Authority’s Clean Energy Academy, and by the end of the program they will also be ready for hire on clean energy job sites across New York City, where there is plenty of work to be done. The require­ment under Local Law 97 (LL97) that large build­ings signif­i­cantly reduce their emis­sions in the coming years has created a broad need for building elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, and a work­force to match. ​“We can pretty much guar­antee that there’s going to be a future in sustain­ability,” said Gary Smith, a senior instructor at Solar One, the nonprofit educa­tion orga­ni­za­tion that runs the training. 

The Clean Energy Academy is exclu­sively open to NYCHA resi­dents, with the aim that they will contribute through paid intern­ships and jobs to decar­bonize NYCHA devel­op­ments, which have their own, strict LL97 time­line sepa­rate from other building types. This year, the program will train 75 resi­dents and offer them each a $1,500 stipend. 

The Academy starts with a course on building science and sustain­ability, including the origins of climate change. Buildings, the course explains, use an enor­mous amount of energy — espe­cially in New York City, where they make up nearly 70 percent of emis­sions. That’s why learning the skills to tran­si­tion them from fossil fuels to clean energy matters, Smith said. ​“We are heading down the unsus­tain­able path with respect to our consump­tion of fossil fuels and the release of CO₂ into the envi­ron­ment,” he said. ​“I under­stand how dire it is and how impor­tant it is for us to combat climate change by building infra­struc­ture that can reduce our carbon emis­sions over the long term.”

Each week, partic­i­pants spend 40 hours in class­rooms and a teaching work­shop where they learn new skills, from the basics of construc­tion, to elec­tric work, plumbing, and how to service heating, venti­la­tion, and air condi­tioning (HVAC) systems. Along the way, they test their knowl­edge and earn certi­fi­ca­tions, including a safety certi­fi­ca­tion from the U.S. Department of Labor, and an EPA certi­fi­ca­tion allowing grad­u­ates to work on HVAC equip­ment. Students leave with ​“all the certi­fi­ca­tions that get them on a job site,” said Alex Zablocki, exec­u­tive director of the Public Housing Community Fund, a nonprofit that raises money to support the roughly 500,000 resi­dents living in public housing across the city. The fund helps connect students with contrac­tors for paid intern­ships following the academy, many for clean energy projects on NYCHA sites. Last year, the program placed 28 students in jobs. 

30-year-old Alize is a Clean Energy Academy student who was working that day in Long Island City on elec­trical wiring. Beyond receiving a stipend for the training, ​“Ultimately, I wanted to have life skills that I could possibly flourish in a related field with,” she said. Her mom works in construc­tion and this was Alize’s first time dipping her toes into a similar trade. She hopes the knowl­edge she’s gaining now can help her to even­tu­ally work in manage­ment in clean energy. 

Transitioning New York City build­ings to clean energy is a mammoth task, but one with the poten­tial to build out a new part of the city’s economy. The New York City Economic Development Corporation projects the clean energy sector could host nearly 400,000 jobs by 2040. And already, there are around 30 training programs like the NYCHA’s preparing New Yorkers for green jobs. 

“Arguably, there’s no part of the city’s economy with more poten­tial to create long term growth than the green economy,” said Eli Dvorkin, edito­rial and policy director at Center for an Urban Future, an inde­pen­dent policy and research organization. 

As this sector expands, Dvorkin points out that it’s impor­tant for clean energy jobs to go to people from under­served commu­ni­ties that have borne the brunt of envi­ron­mental injus­tices for decades. These commu­ni­ties should ​“be first in line to actu­ally get the good green jobs that are going to be growing in the years ahead.” he said. 

But the green job market is ​“far away from being fully charged,” said Dvorkin. In a 2025 report on the state of New York City’s green economy, Dvorkin and co-authors found that while build­ings are required to reduce emis­sions, the pace of actu­ally accom­plishing that has been slow. Since 2017, only around 400 permits have been filed with the Department of Buildings for new heating and cooling systems in multi­family resi­den­tial build­ings — the permit needed to elec­trify a building’s heating and cooling system. Meanwhile, a majority of build­ings success­fully filed their LL97 compli­ance reports for 2025, but experts expect many more build­ings to be out of compli­ance with emis­sions caps by 2030. 

Retrofits and elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, already expen­sive and complex, have also become more costly with rising price infla­tion and tariffs, along with cuts in federal funding for clean energy projects. Federal tariffs imple­mented over the past year have raised prices for construc­tion mate­rials in New York City by around 10 percent, according to a report by the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce. The likely impact of rising costs is fewer projects moving forward — and fewer job open­ings for New Yorkers grad­u­ating from programs like the Clean Energy Academy, said Dvorkin: ​“If we want to see the jobs created, if we want to see the climate bene­fits, we’re going to have to make [building decar­boniza­tion] easier than it is right now, and unfor­tu­nately it’s gotten harder.”

But there are signs that the green job market could improve soon, in New York City at least. In April, the Mamdani admin­is­tra­tion announced an expan­sion of the NYC Accelerator program, a free service to help co-ops, condos, prop­erty managers, and building owners navi­gate LL97 and under­take projects to reduce emis­sions. Beyond that, the Center for an Urban Future’s report recom­mends the city estab­lish a green building fund to lower borrowing costs for build­ings that want to get into compli­ance with local law. 

For those with clean energy training certi­fi­ca­tions, there’s also oppor­tu­nity in the fact that the existing work­force is aging: The Center for an Urban Future’s analysis found that 41 percent of all construc­tion and building inspec­tors in New York City are over the age of 55; That’s 23 percent for elec­trical engi­neers, 22 percent for elec­tri­cians, and 21 percent for HVAC installers. 

While some build­ings are lagging behind their required emis­sions reduc­tions work and choosing to pay fines instead, the city is poised to ​“be a best in class employer in these green fields,” Dvorkin said. That’s because at least a portion of these green jobs will neces­sarily have to come from NYCHA; the housing authority is required under federal law to source a portion of its work­force from public housing resi­dents. ​“We’re already creating an ecosystem that demands NYCHA resi­dents work on these job sites,” said Zablocki, who hopes the private sector will also look to the Clean Energy Academy work­force to hire in the future. 

Clean energy work in public housing is only set to expand — in late April, Mayor Mamdani released an updated sustain­ability agenda for NYCHA that includes tran­si­tioning 20,000 apart­ments from fossil fuel heating to clean energy, installing induc­tion stoves, and adding elec­tric vehicle charging stations. 

“It would be the wrong answer to just push LL97 compli­ance further down the road,” Dvorkin said, ​“but we have to take seri­ously what those barriers are to actu­ally getting into compli­ance.” Breaking those barriers down, he said, will start New Yorkers on the path to clean energy careers to ulti­mately lower the city’s emis­sions and get closer to meeting climate goals.