Clean Energy Industries

Clean energy industries are playing an increasingly central role in the North East’s economic transformation, supporting the transition to net zero while driving innovation, investment, and high‑value employment across the region. This evidence base brings together the latest data on the sector, providing a detailed overview of its scale, composition, and contribution both locally and nationally.

The clean energy sector encompasses a wide range of low‑carbon and renewable activities, including offshore and onshore wind, solar, hydrogen, nuclear, bioenergy, carbon capture, renewable heat, clean technologies, and energy management. These industries are rapidly expanding as the UK works toward its decarbonisation goals, and the North East—home to nationally significant energy assets and major infrastructure developments—is at the forefront of that shift.

This page presents comprehensive evidence on employment trends, sector growth, business activity, and the changing structure of the low‑carbon economy. It also highlights where clean energy jobs are concentrated geographically, offering insight into the region’s strengths and emerging opportunities. By combining national datasets with North East‑specific analysis, the evidence base supports strategic decision‑making and helps identify where the region is best placed to lead in the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable energy system.

The North East Local Growth Plan, published in March 2025, identifies offshore wind and energy transition as a sector where the North East has unique economic assets and opportunities.The UK's Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June 2025, includes clean energy industries as one of the nation's eight growth-driving sectors (the 'IS8' sectors).

The UK Industrial Strategy's sector plan defines the clean energy industries as industries which directly contribute to the
clean power transition. These are the companies that are part of the supply chain, manufacturing and services relating to the deployment, construction, and maintenance of clean energy assets and products. The North East is home to the UK's most advanced offshore wind industrial cluster with large offshore wind farms, a significant knowledge and capabilities base from decades of energy production, and leading innovation institutions such as Ore Catapult.

The clean energy industries are too broad for the SIC classification system as activity takes place across a range of SIC codes and the SIC codes are often too high-level to accounrately define activity in clean energy assets and products. For this reason, ONS employment and enterprises data from the Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES) and the UK Business Counts cannot be used to measure the size of the clean energy industries sector in the North East or in the UK.

To define the subsectors of the clean energy industires, this analysis has relied on DataCity's Real-Time-Industrial-Classifications (RTICs). This data is gathered using data from Companies' House and businesses' own website to define which subsectors each enterprise operates in. The subsectors used to proxy the clean energy industries sector are detailed below: