The positive impacts of an increasing share of renewable energy on the mitigation of climate change as well as on the decrease of the dependency of energy imports are indisputable. However, one persistent problem for the German economy has been its high level of unemployment in the recent past. Therefore, any policy strategy will be measured also by its net impact on the labor market. The paper describes the results of a study that models this impact and is novel within three respects: firstly, an Input-Output-Vector for the renewable energy sector was developed based on the results of more than 1000 interviews with an extensive questionnaire, secondly gross and net effect of two different policy scenarios for Germany until 2030 were calculated and thirdly the approach varies from earlier studies by its explicit modeling of export and foreign trade effects. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.