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QUALITY DECLARATION - SUMMARY

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT

For information on the institutional environment of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), including the legislative obligations of the ABS, financing and governance arrangements, and mechanisms for scrutiny of ABS operations, please see ABS Institutional Environment.

In producing the experimental estimates contained in this publication the ABS has not collected any information using direct survey methods and has instead used two broad approaches. Firstly, it has accessed publicly-available information such as company annual reports, information provided on company websites, industry association reports and data drawn from the Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) Registry maintained by the Clean Energy Regulator. Secondly, it has made extensive use of the employment factor approach. This approach is a modelling technique that utilises information on installed capacities of renewable energy infrastructure, numbers of installations and employment factors. Employment factors indicate the number of annual direct FTE jobs created per physical unit of choice, for example, numbers of annual FTE employees created per megawatt (MW) of installed capacity of wind power. It is an estimation technique that has been widely used internationally to estimate employment numbers associated with renewable energy activities.


RELEVANCE

Employment in Renewable Energy Activities, Australia 2015 (cat. no. 4631.0) presents estimates of annual direct full time equivalent (FTE) employment in renewable energy activities for the years 2009-10 to 2013-14, by state and territory and by type of renewable energy. These estimates provide the first official Australian estimates of FTE employment in renewable energy activities and will allow analysts to better understand employment patterns in Australia.


TIMELINESS

Estimates of annual direct full time equivalent (FTE) employment in renewable energy activities contained within Employment in Renewable Energy Activities, Australia 2015 are released within 10 months of the end of the reference period.


ACCURACY

Data published in Employment in Renewable Energy Activities, Australia 2015 are considered analytically useful but are also considered experimental and data quality is expected to improve in any subsequent editions of this publication.


COHERENCE

This publication contains the first set of ABS estimates of employment in renewable energy activity. The definitions of employees and employment used in this publication follow the 2008 edition of the System of National Accounts (SNA) and are consistent with those used throughout ABS employment statistics.


INTERPRETABILITY

The explanatory notes of this publication contain four sections, which cover:

• Scope of renewable energy activities
• Categories of renewable energy activities
• Direct and indirect employment in renewable energy activities
• Estimation methodology.