Data center boom strains Texas homebuilders' need for electricians

"To fill the gap, Wristen is hiring teens as apprentices right out of high school.

'They’re new. They don’t even have a set of tools,” Wristen said. “It’s usually about four or five months of hell where we have little mistakes that cost us time and money. It’s fixable. … And once they are trained in it, you don’t have those little deals anymore.'"

Oh wow, you mean you have to train apprentices in the trade if you want to have enough workers around to meet demand? My brother is IBEW in the PNW and had a lot of classmates that trained by working for data centers- he always framed it as a pretty sweet deal, some of those companies would even cover the cost of tools for new apprentices, you earn them as you progress through the program.

If you're going to rely on people you have to invest in them- if you're only willing to pay $20/hr for pre-trained people, don't expect them to show you any loyalty in return.

Does anybody have more insight into the demand for electricians during data center construction? This article is really light on the details. I was researching it recently and got the impression that the majority of electricians hired during DC construction are much more specialized than the average residential electrician. It also seems like large data center construction typically demands a magnitude of several hundred electricians during the peak of construction. Which to me sounds like a lot less demand for the average electrician than some of the news outlets have been claiming.

Nice to see these data centers are paying their electricians well. That should make salaries more competitive all around.

> Scotty Wristen, the owner of WE Electric in Abilene, lost five workers to the data centers. He can only afford to pay employees $20 an hour.

Data centers being able to pay more is only part of it, $20/hr is a ridiculous wage for an electrician.

My union electricians in a metro area of 3M make $57/hr in wages and around $43 in fringe benefits and they’re receiving a 4% raise on Friday. We have plenty of electricians here since they’re compensated well.