Data center boom strains Texas homebuilders' need for electricians | Hacker News Reader

Data center boom strains Texas homebuilders' need for electricians

texastribune.org

22 pointshn_acker14 comments

"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.

> 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.

Sounds like he needs to be out of business

Abilene is nothing like a metro area of 3 million people.

$20/hour is a bit low, but union journeymen were making $33/hour in San Antonio, so I don't know that $20 is too extreme.

$33/hr seems low, but considering the median income in my metro area ($100k) is 55-60% higher than San Antonio ($65k), it about lines up with the higher journeyman wage here compared to the median income of just under $100k. I thought Texas had higher wages than that overall, guess I was wrong.

$20/hr for a non-union residential electrician isn’t unreasonable then, strangely enough.

Some people need higher pay to offset the opportunity costs of living in a very rural area.

Scotty probably loves capitalism until it affects him personally.

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.

If someone has an electrical license, they’re allowed to work as an electrician on a project. As long as there are enough experienced commercial electricians around to tell the residential guys what to do, it would be OK, there’s a ton of work on these projects that doesn’t require much or any thinking.

They probably fly the best guys in anyways.

This is likely just Homebuilders passing the blame for not building more/finishing work while rates and materials are too high.

That’s not necessary. There’s nothing particularly fancy about data center power that warrants it.

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

Well presumably they are paying well, but the competition wasn't hard to beat. The guy complaining about losing workers was only pay 20 bucks an hour for workers that have to own and supply their own tools and holding a trade license and holding some personal liability for their work because of the license. At that wage just a 2-3 dollar difference, or the potential for overtime pay, would make most workers jump ship. As trade workers they live boom-bust cycles and gotta make that money when they can.

Homebuilding in the Southern and Western US is almost entirely based on illegal labor. Trump's immigration policies have dried that labor pool up. These poor helpless homebuilders are getting exactly what they voted for and instead of blaming themselves they want to blame the easiest target at the moment: data centers

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