Renewable Energy Engineer

Career Area: Engineering

Occupation Group: Chemical, Biomedical, and Related Engineering

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Renewable Energy Engineer earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $83,842

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $90,952

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Develops engineering and systems for energy produced from renewable sources such as solar energy, wind energy and hydropower.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Renewable Energy Engineer is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• Writing: Experience expressing business messages effectively in written form. This may include planning drafting and revising as necessary.
• Microsoft Excel: Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications.
• Research: Experience performing creative and systematic work to understand a product, market, or customer, either before building a new solution, or to troubleshoot an existing issue
• Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Renewable Energy: Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources, which are naturally replenished on a human timescale, such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat.
• Project Management: Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.
• Project Planning and Development Skills: Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.
• Commissioning: Working experience of Commissioning. Commissioning, a process or service provided to validate the completeness and accuracy of a project or venture: Building commissioning, a quality assurance process during and following building construction.
• Business Development: Business development entails tasks and processes to develop and implement growth opportunities within and between organizations.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Renewable Energy Engineer that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Energy Reduction: Energy conservation are efforts made to reduce the consumption of energy by using less of an energy service.
• Energy Services: Energy services are a broad range of energy solutions including designs and implementation of energy savings projects, retrofitting, energy conservation, energy infrastructure outsourcing, power generation and energy supply, and risk management.
• Biomass: Biomass is an industry term for getting energy by burning wood, and other organic matter.
• Power Generation: Electricity generation is the process of generating electric power from sources of primary energy.
• Energy Industry: The energy industry is the totality of all of the industries involved in the production and sale of energy, including fuel extraction, manufacturing, refining and distribution.

Salary Boosting Skills

A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:

• Natural Gas: Natural gas is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon gas mixture consisting primarily of methane, but commonly including varying amounts of other higher alkanes, and sometimes a small percentage of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide, or helium.
• Engineering Analysis: Engineering analysisinvolves the application of scientific analytic principles and processes to reveal the properties and state of a system, device or mechanism under study.
• Power Generation: Electricity generation is the process of generating electric power from sources of primary energy.
• Electric Vehicle: An electric vehicle, also called an electric drive vehicle, uses one or more electric motors or traction motors for propulsion.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Energy Engineer
• Project Manager - Energy
• Renewable Energy Engineer
• Senior Renewable Development Engineer - Energy
• Renewable Energy Engineer - Senior-Level

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• Energy Engineer
• Energy Analyst / Auditor
• Wind Energy Engineer