About
About the Clean Energy Internship Program
The RI Clean Energy Internship Program is a paid 12-week internship program managed by the Office of Energy Resources (OER) and Rhode Island Commerce’s Renewable Energy Fund (REF). It is designed to help provide internship opportunities in clean energy careers, ranging across marketing, engineering, research, solar, direct construction, energy efficiency and more! Students and recent graduates will be able to professionally develop under the mentorship of an industry partner to combat real world problems in energy and the environment.
The program runs three times per year in spring, summer, and fall. OER reimburses host companies for intern wages up to $16/hour, up to 40 hours per week, for 12 weeks. While host companies are welcome to pay above the minimum wage subsidy, there is no upfront cost to participate. Employers and students connect through the internship portal, where both parties create profiles, submit materials, and connect for interviews.
This is not a recruitment opportunity to work at OER, but rather, OER manages this internship portal where students and companies create accounts, upload application documents, and schedule interviews. OER reimburses the host company for the cost of hosting students as interns. Since its launch in 2019, the program has placed 174 interns at 39 different companies, with 22 receiving full or part-time jobs at their host companies as a result of their internship.
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200+ interns 40+ host companies 30+ interns kept on beyond their internship
Clean Energy Jobs Report
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As detailed in the 2025 Rhode Island Clean Energy Industry Report, the industry has surpassed 15,000 jobs for the first time in five years! The state’s clean energy workforce added more than 200 jobs since the 2024 reporting period, representing a 1.5 percent increase, faster than the state’s overall employment growth of 1.1 percent.
Renewable and efficient heating was the fasting growing sector, with an added 185 jobs, equaling a 4.7 percent increase. Solar jobs grew by 1.1%, while wind stayed stagnant from last year at 614 jobs due to the federal stop-work order.
The engineering, research, and professional services value-chain sector is also trending upward at a 2.3 percent growth rate, adding 66 jobs. Traditional HVAC added 100 jobs, increasing by 7.0 percent, while high-efficiency HVAC followed with 73 new jobs, reflecting a 4.0 percent growth rate.
In energy efficiency, 69 jobs were added, half of them coming from the advanced building materials sector. The other growing sectors are ENERGY STAR appliances® and efficient lighting. Energy storage, microgrids and smart grids stayed nearly the same.
The 2025 Rhode Island Clean Energy Industry Report is the eleventh annual report on clean energy employment in the state. The findings in this report are based on data from the 2025 U.S. Energy and Employment Report (USEER) and are filtered for Rhode Island’s (RI) definition of clean energy. The 2025 USEER survey was administered in 2024, by telephone (more than 1,350,000 outbound calls) and web (more than 264,000 emails sent), to participants throughout the United States. The USEER provides a rich, comprehensive, and historical dataset of energy job trends dating back to 2015.