Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The Carbon Copy: The great electrician shortage

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today. We’re bringing you a special crossover episode this week from Catalyst’s sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. I host the show and we did an episode recently about this urgent climate tech problem: America’s shortage of electricians.  To decarbonize the economy, we need to electrify everything. That means installing millions of heat pumps, EV chargers, electric water heaters and rooftop solar panels.  But there’s one big problem: finding enough electricians to make it happen. Electricians across the country are flooded with work — and just as demand is skyrocketing, many in the field are nearing retirement age.  This week, in a special collaboration with Grist, reporter Emily Pontecorvo discusses where to find all the electricians we need to electrify everything and how we can train enough new entrants to the field to meet our climate goals. Read Emily’s feature article. Transcript available here. Recommended Resources: Canary: We need a lot more electricians if we’re going to electrify everything Canary: How to get contractors on board with heat pumps and electrification Canary: US climate law to spur thousands of new jobs in every state Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

Hello, Catalyst listeners. Stephen Lacey here. I'm the executive producer of the show, and we are bringing you a special crossover episode this week from the carbon copy. That's a show I host. We did an episode recently that I think is going to resonate with a lot of you. It's about this urgent climate tech problem, America's shortage of electricians. You know that to decarbonize the economy, we need to electrify as much as possible.

We have billions of machines that we need to swap out, and that means installing new heat pumps, EV chargers, electric water heaters, rooftop solar, panels, just electrify as much as possible. But electricians across the country are flooded with work just as demand is skyrocketing, and many in the field are nearing retirement age, and that means it's hard to get that work done. So we work with the nonprofit newsroom Grist on this special episode that we're bringing you, and in it I talked to reporter Emily Ponticorvo about where we can find all the electricians we need to electrify everything. She went on this mission and talked to people who are in training programs, who are having trouble getting the work done. It's a really fun episode.

I think it is a great illustration of the economy-wide challenges we face as we undergo this transition. And one more thing before we start, I want to tell you about a live episode of the Carbon Copy. We're hosting on April 6th in Somerville, Massachusetts at Greentown Labs. We're going to have some very special guests, Priya Danti, the head of climate change AI, and Jesse Moritz. who is the CEO of the Energy Web Foundation and some other guests who are focused on this broad category of AI and digital climate solutions. We're going to be talking about this extremely hot sector

and talk about artificial intelligence and all the real-world applications already out in the energy sector and in climate solutions. We're going to sort through high, provide context, and talk about high-value applications in the energy system. And that's not all. We've got a panel led by Canary Media's Maria, Virginia, Alano with some top energy and climate journalists in New England, and we're going to have

drinks, food networking. So come spend some time with me, the Canary Media team, and the PostScript Media team at Greentown Labs on April 6th. Get your ticket in the link in the show notes. And now, without further ado, here's our special episode of the Carbon Copy, The Great Electrician Shortage. From the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. We talk a lot on this show about the movement to electrify everything, including how we heat our homes, how we get from place to place. And to reach our climate goals, we need to install millions of heat pumps, electric water heaters, rooftop solar panels, and EV charging ports. That means we need to find people who are trained to install them. But what happens if we can't find them?

This week, we've got a special collaboration with Grist, and our guest contributor today is a Grist staff writer, Emily Ponticorvo. So she has been working to untangle this electrification puzzle in a feature for Grist, and she's here with us now to explain it. Emily, welcome to the show. Hey, Stephen. Thanks so much for having me on. Okay, so I'm very intrigued by this story. There's obviously a lot of momentum around electrifying everything, but it appears there's some bottlenecks. So where does this story begin?

So this past summer, I was in the Bay Area, which is like the birthplace of the movement to electrify everything. Berkeley, California was the first city in the country to ban gas and new buildings, and that was back in 2019. Now, dozens of cities have followed. And so while I was there, I talked to a lot of homeowners who had tried to electrify some aspect of their home, like switch to heat pumps or install an electric vehicle charger. Homeowners like Champori Reth. My name's Champori, and I, a product designer, had a company called Airtable, and I moved to, Berkeley with my partner a couple of years ago at the end of 2020. We were just kind of browsing and ended up finding the South that we fell in love with. And then came the joys and tribulations

of homework ownership. Chimpore is not like a diehard environmentalist or anything, but he told me he's concerned about climate change and his new home uses natural gas. And so he wants to eventually go fully electric. Before switching out his stove or anything, he's decided to start with getting rooftop solar. And it wasn't as straightforward as he hoped. It turned out that the number of amps that we have in our house didn't really support having solar panels. So that was why we were looking for an electrician, was to look at upgrading our electricity. And I didn't realize just how difficult that would be. This problem that Champuri was facing is common. There's this nonprofit rewiring America, and they estimate

that something like 60 to 70% of homes in the U.S. are going to need to upgrade their electrical panels in order to accommodate solar or new electric appliances. But when Champorey started looking for an electrician... That was very eye-opening. They were basically all pretty booked out pretty far in advance, I think one with several months. And so that was very, very disheartening.

It wasn't just that the electricians were busy. The entire process just, just felt kind of backward. It's just hilarious because it just felt like, you know, trying to get your kid into, like, you know, a nice kindergarten or preschool where you, like, have to be interviewed and do a lot of things just to get on the radar of these electricians. Oh, man, I can completely relate to this.

So I moved into a new older house about a year ago. And over the last year, we have been going through a lot of upgrades. We're re-insulating the house. We're completely rewiring the house. We've added heat pumps. We've replaced all the old windows. And so I've dealt with a lot of different kinds of contractors. And it's been really hard to set up the work because everybody is super busy.

They're coming in, trying to assess whether the project is worth it. And I found an electrician who I really love who's helped me through this process. But they are so busy. and it's really hard to get on their schedule. So I can definitely relate to how tough it is to find the right electrician. Yeah, I mean, and I talk to a bunch of homeowners just like you, just like Champori, all over the country who have had this experience. And that's with this sort of baseline demand for electricians that we have today. I mean, the switch to heat pumps and EVs has barely even started.

Right. And this switch is very urgent. Transportation is almost a third of U.S. carbon emissions. and burning fossil fuels at home is another 10%. I mean, and now we have a chance to actually cut those emissions because of technological advancements and new incentive through the Inflation Reduction Act that was just passed. There's billions of dollars in rebates to help people make the switch.

So the table is set for widespread electrification, but... It just won't be possible without more people trained to do this work. This is the carbon copy. I'm Stephen Lacey. And I'm Emily Ponte Corvo. And this week we're asking. Why are electricians so hard to find? And how do we build up the workforce to electrify everything? When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub.

Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energyhub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital,

and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fishtank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fishtank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like fish tank PR. To learn more about fish tank's approach, visit fish tankpr.com. That's FISCH, fish tankpr

dot com. So I didn't just hear about this problem from homeowners. I also spoke to a bunch of contractors who, let me just say, they were not easy to get a hold of. They are truly swamped. But I met this guy, Boran Reyes. So my name is Boen Ray. and I'm currently CEO of Boys Electric Incorporator. We currently have two locations, one in Oakland and one in Sacramento. Borin's young. He's only 28. He grew up in Guatemala and came to California when he was a teenager. And he first got introduced to electrical work in high school.

His dad was a general contractor and Borin would come to help out on jobs over the summer. At one point, this electrician that his dad worked with needed an extra hand. And so Boran started working for that guy. and it just set him on this whole new path. When I was about a rider from high school, I decided that I wanted to do that for living. Plus, you know, back then I was kind of thinking, you know, I want to make money quick.

It was the easiest way for me to make money quick and eventually move out of the house. It was mostly about the money at first, but Boren came to really like the work too. What I really, really like is you really have to be focused on it because literally it's a safety. and also you have to be hands-on most of the time and also like solving problems.

Putting pieces together, what type of system am I going to install? How am I going to be running this wire? How am I going to run this conduit? You know, why the customer is overloading the circuit. There are so many things that go with that. And that's why I fell in love. These days, Boren is busy. He's got 12 technicians at his company,

and he can barely keep up with demand. If we're super busy and then we don't do any advertisement. If it's organic, we're getting a minimum of three to four calls a day. If we do advertise, at that point we get up to 15, 20 calls a day. It's crazy because customers are literally looking for electricians every single day. And then now before, you know, we're able to get to an emergency right away. Now we cannot. So we're not taking emergency calls anymore because we don't have the main power.

Part of the reason he's not taking emergency calls anymore is because he's got this new specialty. About a year ago, Boren entered a partnership with this company called Q Merit. They sent him new electric vehicle owners who need someone to install their chargers. And so now he's doing a lot of that kind of work. He says he's usually booked up like three weeks to a month in advance. I asked him if he could expand his team to take on more jobs, and he said it just wasn't possible right now. Because it's not just a matter of, hey, yeah, let me hire. people and then because you have to go with them through training.

And so it might take you a month to two months for them to be ready to finally go out on the field, know how to interact with customers. And then they will not know how to execute the job right away. It might take them a year. So now it's going to take a lot of our resources to be focused on these job. Like for example, we should get it down within two days. And then now it's taking three days because my lead technician is taking the time to teach them on the field, which is the best way to learn, but it's literally taking time

out of it and it's cut in profits. It's just really complicated. So is it like there's nobody out there who, if you were just like looking for an experience electrician, there's nobody out there that you could hire. Like it would, there's only people that are basically new to the field. That is correct. That is correct. Because all the, all the people that currently know how to do the work, they're currently busy. I mean, they're currently taken by other companies, and now they're getting paid really, really good. Okay, so let me get this straight.

We've got a lot of homeowners who want to electrify, but they can't find electrical contractors. We've got contractors who want to ride this electrification wave. They see it as a chance to grow and take on more jobs, but they can't find electricians to hire. So why don't we have more people coming in for these jobs that are in demand and pretty high paying? It's a great question.

And it's one that I asked pretty much everyone I spoke with. A lot of people blame the fact that we don't really push vocational education in high school in the U.S. anymore. You know, there's just been this push toward everyone going to four-year colleges. Here's Panama Bartholomey. He's one of the experts that I spoke with. And he is the executive director of this nonprofit called the Building Decarbonization Coalition. We're seeing a grain of the workforce. And we're seeing all these people that have spent their career knowing how learning,

intricacies of how to install HVAC correctly, how to install water heaters correctly, et cetera, and they're graying out. You know, the average age is 55 right now for an HVAC installer or a plumber. I think one of the big questions is really, like, do millennials and zoomers see the, see a career for themselves and crawl spaces and addicts doing this work? I mean, it's, it's some good work, but we don't encourage people to go into the trades in this country. You should be going to four-year college and go and learn C++ programming, not working in the trades. This right here is such an important point because we need more people to do the work of decarbonization, and that means more boots on the ground jobs. And we're seeing

an aging workforce across the trades in the utility space, in electrical contracting, in plumbing. And so we need to bring in younger workers, and we need more of vocational opportunities. So as I've done a lot of work on our house, I've used that as an opportunity to teach our three-year-old about how important electricians, plumbers, and builders are, and how they're doing the most foundational work in our society. So this is partly a cultural problem. We need people to be able to see this career as an option when they're young. We just need to, we just need to value it more as a society. Yeah, totally. I mean, I feel the same, I didn't have any vocational education opportunities in my high school.

And let's not forget that you can make pretty good money doing this. The median salary for an electrician in the Bay Area is about $90,000. And a lot of people make six figures. Sign me up. But really, if I wanted to transition my career and suddenly become an electrician, how would I do it? Well, so I learned in reporting the story that there are many different paths into the field. For one, you can apply to a union apprenticeship program. Those are free, and they offer paid on-the-job training.

It's pretty nice, but there's a test to get in, and there's limited spots. So some people go a different route. They start by finding a licensed contractor like Borin who's willing to take them on and train them in the field. And then many community colleges also offer training programs. But this, I found, is where there's another bottleneck in this whole story. Yeah, we talked earlier about this obsession. we have as a country with four-year degrees. So I'm guessing, on the flip side, that means underfunding community colleges. Yeah, so those community college programs, they aren't exactly

well-funded. But the other problem is, it can be really hard for them to find people to teach the classes, in part because of the shortage of electricians. In the Bay Area, this birthplace of Electrify Everything, the place to take electrical training classes is a school called Laney College. and the program there almost collapsed when one of the teachers retired this year. Before we get to it, we're going to take a very quick break, and then when we come back, we'll hear about what happened at Laney College and then explore some solutions to this cascading problem. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity,

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place to be. Let me introduce you to David Pitt. It'll still probably be kind of noisy, so I apologize, but we'll see how it does. Okay, that's okay. I can create a little atmosphere. I met him on this old sailboat in the Oakland Marina back in July. He uses it as an office, and I wanted to talk to him because he was in the middle of finishing the electrical program at Laney College. He got into electric work almost by accident. At one point, when I was just working various cats, I was doing TaskRabbit and I was tutoring people and just things I could get quick cash. And I would just travel and was kind of a bum in my mid-20s. And then at some point a friend of mine was like, hey, I saw this sign you can volunteer install solar on a rooftop.

Check it out. You might like that kind of thing. He liked it so much that he kept going back. He ended up getting a job with the company. But he soon realized that in order to progress in this career, to make more money and do more interesting aspects of the work, he needed to get certified as an electrician. This is something I can really sink my teeth into. It's got a clear career path, which I couldn't say for some of the other gigs I was doing. It's like, okay, you're going to learn this skill and then learn to manage your own business. And then the sky is kind of the limit in a way. So David enrolled in the electrical training program at Laney College, and when I talked to him, he only had about three classes left.

But things had started to go south. There was this one teacher who was covering like six classes per semester and kind of holding the whole program together, and she retired. The deans were having a lot of trouble, finding anyone to replace her. Suddenly, they weren't sure if the school was even going to be able to offer the classes that David needed to finish. I guess the worst case is Lainty collapses and I would look at other community colleges and push it back six months and probably be some paperwork nightmare of transferring credits and be a whole mess. But yeah, those rooms are packed too. I mean, the classes had 40 students in him. The Zoom meetings are just jam-packed.

A lot, a lot of people are trying to get this training. I ended up speaking to the dean at Lainey College over the summer. Her name is Alejandria Tamas, and she was definitely really stressed about this. So when I started in this job in February of 2021, I think my third day on the job, I was already told that we have an issue in finding faculty members to teach in the EET department. EET stands for electrical and electronics technology. It's been a known fact that a lot of our faculty members are doing. are teaching more classes than ideal. How did you feel when you heard that you were losing this teacher?

It was a pretty, it was a pretty scary moment for me because I know that there's a lot of hunger from students to learn this materials. And I know that there's a lot of classes that we're offering. So for me to lose a faculty member who's probably teaching five or six classes. is pretty difficult. So it was a panic moment. This is an issue for a lot of trade skills, disciplines, and in a sense that employees usually earn more

when they work in the field than they are in teaching. So it's hard to recruit for faculty members to our area. I think it's just made worse in EET because there's a shortage of electricians in the Bay Area. By the fall, she still has. hadn't found a replacement. Let's take a pause here for a second. I just need to get my head straight. So homeowners are having trouble getting electrification projects done because contractors are booked up. Contractors can't take on more clients because they can't hire. There's not

enough trained electricians. And people who want to become electricians are having trouble getting through the training because the places where they're supposed to be learning how to become electricians can't find electricians to teach. Am I getting this right? Less. Okay, so this is a giant puzzle. Seems very complicated. How do we piece it together? So there are a number of different solutions. I want to walk you through. And, you know, the first one is the story you just heard about Laney College. I think that points to a need for increased funding for community colleges. So they can hire more faculty and pay them more money. What about the union path? We talked about that earlier. Don't the unions train people as well, like through the apprenticeship programs? That's another really interesting point. So the unions have this robust training pipeline. They offer free classes, paid apprenticeships, and they can offer those because of union dues, but they can only admit so many people. And so I spoke to labor advocates who think we need to strengthen the unions. Right now, union electricians, they don't really do that much work on houses because they're undercut by non-union electricians who can pay their workers less. And I was told that if some of the public funding that was coming out for electrification, had labor standards attached to it, that that could sort of level the

playing field for the unions and help them compete for those jobs, and then they could train more workers. And what about people like Boren at the top of the show? He was talking about how he was doing some worker training too, right? Right. And so I heard from a lot of people that solving this also really hinges on involvement from people like Boren. And that's partly because, you know, they already know how to do this work. They're the people that will ultimately hire these workers. the obstacle there, as Boren talked about, is that training people eats into his profits. That's part of the reason he can't hire and grow right now. Panama Bartholome, who you heard from earlier, he told me that one way to solve this issue

might be to provide funding for this kind of training. Like, for example, the Inflation Reduction Act, it has funding for state energy offices to do workforce development. And some of that could be used to pay, let's say, half or three quarters of the wages of a trainee so that contractors like, you know, like Boren can afford to take them on. I am really curious about what contractors are saying about this carbon-free tech approach overall. You've got people like Boren who are super on it.

He's got this partnership with an EV charger installation company. But in my experience, in talking to my electrician, for example, who's been really great, but also pretty skeptical of whole home electrification, it seems like there is a hesitance among some of the old school contractors about electrifying homes and entirely or about EV chargers and heat pumps. So what is the spectrum of reactions that you're hearing? Yeah, I mean, I also heard a lot of stories about this. I heard homeowners talk about their contractors who told them, like, you're going to need natural gas backup for your heating system, or I also talked to some contractors who were kind of skeptical of electrification. But I think this

hesitancy is something that California is really working on. I heard about this program called Tech Clean, California. And a big part of the program involves training contractors on how to install heat pumps and other technologies. And so they're giving them information about not just how to install them, but what incentives are available and how to like sell them to customers. And so far, they've trained about 600 contractors. Here's Panama Bartholomew talking about it. And so there's a cadre of expert installers that are part of the tech team that are running different cohorts of installers through full-on training programs about not just how to install this stuff, but actually like why they should care that here's all the climate

stuff, sure, but also here's all the policy stuff, like the writing's on the wall that this is coming and you better get ready for it. California's going to be banning this stuff in seven years. So start the transition now when there's a lot of money and incentives going. Okay, so running down the list, we've got more funding. for community colleges. We want to pay contractors to take on trainees, potentially unionizing the work could help, and then you want to make sure contractors actually know how to install carbon-free technologies. Is that the list? Anything else? Well, I feel like we still haven't really talked about the problem that seems to be at the heart of this issue. How can we inspire more people to

want to become electricians in the first place? When I asked Boren this question, he had an answer right away. Showing them how much money they can make. That is just the key. Because they can make just as much as, you know, an engineer. They can make more, you know, than a teacher. They can make more than, you know, a person that will spend their time, you know, three or four years in college.

And then they don't see that. They don't show you that. Yeah, this is exactly what we talked about earlier. This is a cultural problem. It's a marketing problem for the, profession. Yeah, I mean, the whole profession could use some good PR. I spoke to this one expert who works on workforce development. She's at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, and her name is Laura Jean Davignon. One thing that they're trying to do over there is create resources for

clean energy careers for schools and guidance counselors. And she was really enthusiastic about developing some kind of marketing campaign. Something that we very much, we industry, the Alliance specifically, would like to do is some kind of outreach campaign, you know, talking about energy heroes or some other messaging that resonates with people and just is conveying that there are a range of jobs. That's the kind of thing we really need to start to remove the stigma from these trade jobs. And it could even be trades focused. I don't care. And I have a focus on clean energy. I think we'll have more luck if it does.

Is the construction job sexy enough for someone or do they also want, do they want to be saving the world? I love it. I can imagine these World War II era posters saying become an electrician for the planet. Yes, totally. That's right. Tell your kids. Emily, thank you so much for joining us and for your excellent reporting on this story. Thanks for having me. Emily Pontecorvo is a staff writer at Grist. Thank you so much to her and to Grist for their collaboration. Grist is a magazine dedicated to climate justice and solutions and you can go to gris.org to read Emily's feature. We're also going to link to it in the show notes. The Carbon Copy is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. This episode was produced by Alexandria Her and Emily Ponticorbo.

Anne Bailey is our editor. Sean Marquan mixed the show. He's our engineer. Original music came from Echo Finch in Blue Dot Sessions, and Sean Marquand made our theme. PostScript media is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prilute is a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across a range of sectors.

That includes advanced energy, food and ag, transportation and logistics, advanced materials and manufacturing, and advanced computing. Thanks for engaging with us on social media. If you want to comment on this story, hit us up on Twitter. Send us an email to hello at postscriptadio.com or go on over to Apple and Spotify and give us a rating. It's hugely helpful. I'm Stephen Lacey. This is a carbon copy. We'll catch you next week.