About a year and a half ago, Jeremy Reinwald started doing more with his electrician’s license.

He expanded his skills and began installing solar power systems, wiring solar panels to provide electricity to homes and other buildings.

“I think it’s kind of a neat deal,” said Reinwald, who recently started his own business, Reinwald Electric. “I thought it’d be silly not to get involved. I think we’re just starting to see the beginning of it.”

Beyond solar power, the demand for all kinds of renewable energy is growing fast and should continue to be a booming business in the future, said Cylvia Hayes, executive director of Bend-based 3EStrategies, a nonprofit that promotes sustainability.

“The industry is just absolutely mushrooming now, and it’s going to be here to stay,” she said.

And with the expanding renewable energy industry comes new employment opportunities in what are called “green collar” jobs, which could be anything from solar panel installers to wind turbine engineers to biomass plant operators.

“By growing this industry and the green sectors, we really may be helping to create a lot of good paying jobs for people, and jobs that people can go to and feel good about doing,” Hayes said.

To help build up this clean energy work force, Hayes and others have conducted a study for the state of Oregon to take stock of what kinds of jobs will be needed in the next several years, and what kinds of training programs are in place to help people get those jobs. The state has also contracted with her to follow up and help find ways to implement recommendations from the study, which will be released within the next couple of weeks.

For example, the Oregon Employment Department should start tracking green jobs, she said, and there needs to be more communication between clean energy businesses and the organizations that train potential employees.

“In order to meet these near- term needs, these training institutions have to be working on programs right now,” Hayes said. “This will be used to help shape programs through the Oregon community college and university system.”

For instance, she said, the wind power business is picking up, and the industry is saying that it’s going to need 600 wind technicians over the next couple of years. Currently, the training programs are turning out about 34 graduates a year.

And there’s a need for energy engineers, who do everything from energy audits to developing buildings that use renewable resources to working on new technology.

“It’s really different to be engineering energy-related technologies and projects than to be engineering just plain structural (projects),” she said.

Solar power system companies in Oregon, including Bend’s PV Powered, project that they’ll need more than 600 workers combined in the next year, the report states. But representatives of the companies said they don’t know if they’ll be able to find enough workers to make the systems.

Biomass plans

On the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, the tribes are planning to build a larger biomass facility, which will use wood chips and waste to generate power.

While the new plant would probably employ about four or five more people than the existing plant, the project would need welders to build the facility, as well as people trained to operate the boilers and the turbines, said Cal Mukumoto, manager of the Warm Springs biomass project.

“That takes actually a little bit of training,” he said. “It’s something that if you already have the qualification, I think you’ll find that you’ll be demand in the marketplace.”

The biomass industry could also create jobs in the forests, where people are needed to cut down the small trees and collect the woody material that feeds the boilers, he said. And people with an ecology or silviculture background, who would know what to remove from the forest to improve its health, could be in demand as well, he said.

There are at least 28 different training programs around the state for renewable energy, the report found, but those programs need to be expanded.

At Central Oregon Community College, professionals from residential contractors to interior designers to others in the building business can add to their skills with the Sustainable Building Advisor Program, part of a national nine-month certificate training program.

The program starts with green building and sustainable design, and covers other things, including site assessment, indoor air quality and demolition as well,” said M.L. Vidas, who coordinates the course for the college. The goal is to let people bring a sustainable point of view to the building trades.

“If things are tight economically, now’s the time to hone your skills and really use a course like this,” Vidas said. “You open up more opportunities for yourself.”

Class participant Glenn McClean, for example, has brought what he’s learned in the class to his job as the construction manager for the Bend-area Habitat for Humanity. The last two houses the organization built were certified by Earth Advantage as green and sustainable, with features such as increased installation and a design to take advantage of the sun’s heat in the winter.

“I want to see it be mainstream,” McClean said. “It should not be something that is exclusive or something that only the rich can afford; it should be on every house everywhere.”

And Jorden Swart, who also took the class, used what he learned to help start his own business, Brilliant Environmental Building Products. His goal, he said, is to match people with the green products that fit their needs, whether it be healthy air or energy efficiency.

Contractors who want to differentiate themselves during the slowdown in the housing market are now more interested in what he’s doing, Swart said.

Solar instruction

And over on the west side of the Cascades, Dan Campbell is training electricians to work in solar power businesses at the Central Electrical Training Center in Tangent. About 350 electricians in Central Oregon and the Willamette Valley have been trained through the program, he said. And although there aren’t enough solar projects to keep people employed full-time, that could change, he said.

“We think it’s a market that’s going to continue to grow, and we’ll have a well-trained work force before the demand really hits,” Campbell said.

Conventional power costs are going to go up, he said, while technological advancements should decrease the cost of solar systems, making them more attractive to customers.

“I think we’re seeing the same thing among our community of electricians that you’re seeing out there generally,” Campbell said. “People are just gaining a lot more interest in the potential of green power, and our electricians are a lot like the general public in that regard.”

In Bend, E2 Powered sells, designs and installs solar electric and solar hot water systems for commercial and residential customers, said Kelli Hewitt, who owns the business with her husband, Mike.

What started off as a lifestyle choice for Hewitt has caught on as people decide to turn to solar for a variety of social or political reasons.

“The green market isn’t weird anymore; it’s not the hippie thing,” she said.

A green collar job to her is one that’s sustainable and doesn’t contribute to the degradation of the planet, she said. There’s a need for trained labor in the solar power industry, she said, since Oregon has a unique set of rules for licensing electricians. And there’s also a need for people in areas like sales who can discuss how the technologies operate and their benefits.

For Hayes, part of the excitement over the need for green jobs is that they could be filled by people who have lost jobs in manufacturing when their employers moved the work overseas, she said.

The next step, she said, is coming up with a suite of proposals for the Legislature’s 2009 session that will strengthen the training programs for green jobs and help the state meet the demand from the clean energy sector.

“We are in the early stages of an economic revolution that really is on the scale of the first Industrial Revolution,” she said. “We have really not even scratched the surface of the kinds of companies and innovations and jobs that are going to be created around it.”

• For more information about the Sustainable Building Advisor Program at Central Oregon Community College, visit noncredit.cocc.edu/sbap/default.aspx.

• To learn about electrician training for solar power, visit www.mhcc.edu/pages/1406.asp.

• For information on Columbia Gorge Community College’s Renewable Energy Technology program, which covers wind energy, visit www.cgcc.cc.or.us/Academics/RenewableEnergyTechnology.cfm.

• And for more information on the Oregon Institute of Technology’s Renewable Energy Systems program, visit www.oit.edu/portland/res.