Two important issues cloud the future of the electrical contacting industry: dramatically increased demand for power, and a talent pool that will be challenged due to the anticipated retirement of the baby boomer generation, with no guarantees about how these workers will be replaced. For some contractors, that might seem either perplexing or downright scary. But it doesn’t have to be.

Pro Football Hall of Fame coach George Allen was fond of saying that the future is now. While no one can predict what the future holds for the industry, what is true is that innovations in technology and workforce are already coming into view. Understanding what’s coming and how it will affect individual businesses and the industry as a whole is what will win the day as the years and decades unfold. As NECA moves into its next 125 years, let’s look at what’s next.

Dealing with the labor shortage

When considering the future, a couple of numbers stand out. A new study from the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), Arlington, Va., predicts that U.S. electricity demand is going to jump more than 55% by 2050, with data centers driving 38% of net electricity consumption through 2037.

That’s a little more than 10 years from now, and for electrical contractors, there will be plenty of work in the relatively short term to manage all that power.

The big question is, who will do all that work?

Chris Kuehl is an economist and managing director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, Lawrence, Kan. “Economists consider the future five minutes from now,” he said, adding that there are trends from the past few years that are likely to accelerate.

One glaring trend is the overall labor shortage anticipated by the end of this decade. All baby boomers, comprising some 72 million total workers, will reach retirement age by then.

Many longtime skilled electricians who are adept at everything from installing panelboards and running cable to the ins and outs of the National Electrical Code could retire. Kuehl predicts that some of those workers will be coaxed into returning to their profession to keep up with the work.

But not all will come, so a new cohort of workers will need to be trained, primarily Generation Z and millennials. That creates its own challenges, he said, which could be addressed by investments made in community colleges and trade schools, possibly by hyperscalers like Google, Meta, Microsoft and others as they battle to win the A.I. race and need data centers built as fast as possible.

Therein lies the challenge. This new cohort will be familiar with new technology, but they won’t be as familiar with the technology of machines built decades ago—machines old-timers knew very well.

“There is a lot of personal training that needs to be done,” Kuehl said. “Gen Z and millennial workers have the mindset that they won’t be with a company for 40 years.

“It’s a culture clash, too,” he continued. “The future of things for electrical contractors is going to be a whole lot more technological and a lot more flexible. There is going to have to be a recognition [that] you can’t have someone work 70 hours a week and not complain. In the old days, they would work until the job was done.”

“The baby boomer generation advanced this industry in ways we’re still building on, and you can’t replace that overnight. That’s why we’re working to keep the retiring workforce involved through programs that pass their knowledge and experience down to the next generation,” said David Long, NECA’s CEO. “We’re also seeing a real shift in how young people think about their future—the straight path from high school to a four-year degree isn’t the only story anymore. More kids are going straight into the trades, and electrical work offers the kind of pay, stability and purpose that’s hard to match. The electrical industry offers more than just a job—it’s a family-sustaining career. We just have to keep making the case and investing in the pipeline.”

Don Leavens, NEMA’s senior vice president and chief economist, said the nation’s mindset about four-year colleges versus trade jobs will need to change. 

“We need more people to recognize that manufacturing jobs are good, that electrician jobs are good and solid and to build up that,” he said. “But on the other hand, to transfer all of that training investment into apprenticeships and community colleges, we have to be careful how we go about that.”

The rise of the bots

Shawn DuBravac, an economist, futurist and author, is quick to point out that technology moves slowly—until it doesn’t.

Case in point: if you’re of a certain age, you might recall watching “The Jetsons,” the iconic 1960s cartoon with its wisecracking robot maid Rosie. For decades, there was a lot of talk about how, someday, Rosie would be ubiquitous in American homes. 

This isn’t to say that Rosie robots will soon be taking over the work of electricians. But what that will ultimately look like will come into view within the next decade.

“Anytime you see a market like the electrician market that’s short-staffed, it would be natural to say, can we throw technology at this to improve the productivity [and] improve the efficiency of who we have?” DuBravac said.

He added that if the price on humanoid robots from companies such as Standard Bots, Glen Cove, N.Y., and Boston Dynamics, Waltham, Mass., drops, demand for them and what they can offer to contractors will increase.

DuBravac said, “Deploying them in environments where electricians currently operate, does that look like replacement or augmentation?” 

DuBravac doubts that contractors will hand over complex tasks to a robot. But robots could do tasks such as transport bags full of expensive tools on a job site, for example.

“Robots today aren’t able to do the tasks at the speed humans can,” he said. “Imagine we’ve got a huge project and we’ve got electricians working two shifts. You could have a robot fleet that runs at night doing what they are doing, but when the electricians come in in the morning, they check what has been done.”

“This technology isn’t here to replace electricians—it’s here to make them safer and more efficient at what they already do,” Long said. “Workplace safety is a must! That’s why we’re actively developing training programs at every level, from apprentice to executive, so everyone is ready to put these tools to work. The contractors who invest in that kind of preparation are going to have a real edge in hiring and in the field.”

DuBravac sees a scenario where robots could take over jobs such as waiting on customers at a fast-food drive-through. The human workers there could thus shift to higher-skill work where wages would be higher and provide stronger opportunity for advancement.

Now consider Kuehl’s takes on robots, which he considers as potential coworkers with a human electrician, or a “cobot.”

What might that look like? A cobot could be as simple as a headset that monitors what an electrician does with augmented reality, almost like a video game. Or it could be a device with an arm attached to it, providing an electrician a third arm to hold tools and equipment.

“It’s a whole host of things,” Kuehl said. “Most of them are in factories to this point, but they are capable of doing that. It’s almost a machine as an adjunct to a person.”

As such, DuBravac said, for contractors, “their job will change before their job is replaced. For a long time they will do work in conjunction with robots.”

Humans and robots will be necessary to build the incoming swath of data centers—according to Pew Research Center, more than 1,500 are in development nationwide—and the frequent upgrades beyond the build.

“With data centers, we’re finding every five to seven years they are swapping out the electronics that consume a lot more power,” DuBravac said. “A data center that is used for e-commerce, a server rack 10 years ago [operated at] 15 kWh. Now with Nvidia chips, they are using 600 kWh. Replacing transformers, upgrading the grid has to be done by licensed electricians.”

“The data center build-out isn’t slowing down; it’s becoming a permanent part of what we do,” Long said. “These facilities have to be maintained, upgraded and kept running around the clock, and that’s ongoing work for ECs for years to come. The opportunity here is bigger than most people realize.”

What will the industry look like as far out as 2050? Again, no guarantees, but Kuehl sees a lot of positives thanks to the combination of technology, including robots and cobots, and investments in the labor force.

“I think you’ll see a solid workforce, a little smaller than it is now, but highly trained,” he said. “An electrical contractor keeping up with the technology will be worth their weight in gold. It’s what happened with manufacturing. You need to know how to do the work now, but you’re going to have to manage that cobot and manage your A.I. headset.”

Leavens said he’s bullish about the future because “there is so much to achieve for everyone.”

But make no mistake, there will be major challenges for the entire electrical industry.

“The grid is over 100 years old, [and] much of that distribution is 100 years old,” he said. “There are still places in upstate Maine where transformers and lines are just hooked to a tree. They didn’t have poles.

“We have a fragile system that is vulnerable to not just cybersecurity, but also the elements, and we’re making investments,” Leavans said. “I don’t want to beat up on utilities. They are making huge, long-term investments. We’ll see great leaps over the next 10 years.”

Thus, the future is now for those contractors who embrace it.

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