“We had challenges as we were building a new supply chain for a new technology and then workforce,” John Williams, an executive at Southern Nuclear Operating Company, which owns over 45% of Plant Vogtle, said in a webinar hosted by the environmental group Resources for the Future in October.
“It had been 30 years since we had built a new nuclear plant from scratch in the United States. Our workforce didn’t have that muscle memory that they have in other parts of the world, where they have been building on a more regular frequency.”
That workforce “hasn’t been building nuclear plants” since heavy construction stopped at Vogtle in 2023, he noted — but they have been busy “building data centers and car manufacturing in Georgia.”
Williams said that it would take another “six to 10” AP1000 projects for costs to come down far enough to make nuclear construction routine. “If we were currently building the next AP1000s, we would be farther down that road,” he said. “But we’ve stopped again.”
J.R. Richardson, business manager and financial secretary of the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers Local 1579, based in Augusta, Georgia, told me his union “had 2,000 electricians on that job,” referring to Vogtle. “So now we have a skill set with electricians that did that project. If you wait 20 or 30 years, that skill set is not going to be there anymore.”
Richardson pointed to the potential revitalization of the failed V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina, saying that his union had already been reached out to about it starting up again. Until then, he said, he had 350 electricians working on a Meta data center project between Augusta and Atlanta.
“They’re all basically the same,” he told me of the data center projects. “They’re like cookie cutter homes, but it’s on a bigger scale.”
To be clear, though the segue from nuclear construction to data center construction may hold back the nuclear industry, it has been great for workers, especially unionized electrical and construction workers.
“If an IBEW electrician says they're going hungry, something’s wrong with them,” Richardson said.
Meta’s Northwest Louisiana data center project will require 700 or 800 electricians sitewide, Richardson told me. He estimated that of the IBEW’s 875,000 members, about a tenth were working on data centers, and about 30% of his local were on a single data center job.
When I asked him whether that workforce could be reassembled for future nuclear plants, he said that the “majority” of the workforce likes working on nuclear projects, even if they’re currently doing data center work. “A lot of IBEW electricians look at the longevity of the job,” Richardson told me — and nuclear plants famously take a long, long time to build.
America isn’t building any new nuclear power plants right now (though it will soon if Rick Perry gets his way), but the question of how to balance a workforce between energy construction and data center projects is a pressing one across the country.
It’s not just nuclear developers that have to think about data centers when it comes to recruiting workers — it’s renewables developers, as well.
“We don’t see people leaving the workforce,” said Adam Sokolski, director of regulatory and economic affairs at EDF Renewables North America. “We do see some competition.”
He pointed specifically to Ohio, where he said, “You have a strong concentration of solar happening at the same time as a strong concentration of data center work and manufacturing expansion. There’s something in the water there.”
Sokolski told me that for EDF’s renewable projects, in order to secure workers, he and the company have to “communicate real early where we know we’re going to do a project and start talking to labor in those areas. We’re trying to give them a market signal as a way to say, We’re going to be here in two years.”
Solar and data center projects have lots of overlapping personnel needs, Sokolski said. There are operating engineers “working excavators and bulldozers and graders” or pounding posts into place. And then, of course, there are electricians, who Sokolski said were “a big, big piece of the puzzle — everything from picking up the solar panel off from the pallet to installing it on the racking system, wiring it together to the substations, the inverters to the communication systems, ultimately up to the high voltage step-up transformers and onto the grid.”
On the other hand, explained Kevin Pranis, marketing manager of the Great Lakes regional organizing committee of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, a data center is like a “fancy, very nice warehouse.” This means that when a data center project starts up, “you basically have pretty much all building trades” working on it. “You’ve got site and civil work, and you’re doing a big concrete foundation, and then you’re erecting iron and putting a building around it.”
Data centers also have more mechanical systems than the average building, “so you have more electricians and more plumbers and pipefitters” on site, as well.
Individual projects may face competition for workers, but Pranis framed the larger issue differently: Renewable energy projects are often built to support data centers. “If we get a data center, that means we probably also get a wind or solar project, and batteries,” he said.
While the data center boom is putting upward pressure on labor demand, Pranis told me that in some parts of the country, like the Upper Midwest, it’s helping to compensate for a slump in commercial real estate, which is one of the bread and butter industries for his construction union.
Data centers, Pranis said, aren’t the best projects for his members to work on. They really like doing manufacturing work. But, he added, it’s “a nice large load and it’s a nice big building, and there’s some number of good jobs.”
IEA
A runner-up in the ESA's Little Pictures of Climate 2023 competitionESA
