Workforce

Central Hudson Gas & Electric, located in Poughkeepsie, New York, and serving the suburbs of metropolitan New York City north to the Capital District at Albany, commemorated more than a century of service in New York state during 2025. The company, which has about 315,000 electricity customers, and 90,00 natural gas customers, provided a program […]

Just hours before his flight back to work on Aug. 24, 2026, seafarer John Cris Tropicales watched his younger brother graduate with a bachelor’s degree in criminology, reported Ulysses “Chuckie” Rivera, community relations manager for Quezon Power (Philippines) Ltd. Co. (QPL) and San Buenaventura Power Ltd. Co. (SBPL). It was a milestone that the Tropicales […]

At the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick at Carnegie Mellon University on July 15, 2025, Westinghouse Electric Co. put a live proof of concept on display: an artificial intelligence (AI) system aimed at reducing the cost and schedule risk of building new AP1000 reactors. According to Westinghouse, the demonstration […]

As battery energy storage systems move into larger and denser configurations, fire and explosion risk has become one of the industry’s most closely scrutinized engineering challenges. At Wärtsilä Energy Storage, Mishaal SyedNaveed has focused his work on that challenge. That combination of utility experience, product engineering, testing, and standards work has made SyedNaveed a finalist […]

Power generation operators are navigating a major workforce transition at the same time operations and maintenance (O&M) work is becoming more complex. Deloitte’s 2025 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook notes that demand for U.S. electricity surpassed expectations in 2025, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) training workloads and electrification initiatives, naturally creating a corresponding surge in […]

When Arevon Energy needed someone to lead financing on Nighthawk, a 300-MW/1,200-MWh battery storage project the company had been working on when Nimmi Kavasery came onboard as the managing director of Project Finance, she made “a battlefield promotion,” handing the lead role to Jack Southard—someone she’d only observed peripherally and who had never run a […]

As data center developers confront tighter power supplies, longer interconnection timelines, and growing scrutiny over who should pay for the grid infrastructure required to serve large loads, those pressures are beginning to reshape another part of the development equation: talent. As states and utilities reconsider how the costs of serving large data center loads should […]

NextEra Energy says an artificial intelligence (AI)–driven dispatch and outage-scheduling tool has saved its customers more than $20 million so far this year. Santee Cooper expects a custom AI weather-forecasting model to help it avoid spot-market purchases that can cost $100,000 an hour during extreme weather. Both utilities say the tools moved from concept to […]

NRG Energy on Aug. 4 unveiled its first Bring Your Own Power (BYOP) project, a 1.2-GW combined-cycle plant in Texas supported by a 15-year contract with an investment-grade “leading global cloud and artificial-intelligence hyperscaler.” The $3.2 billion facility, backed by a customer parent guarantee, is targeted for commercial operation in late 2029 and could be […]

For most of the last two decades, the anxiety in power planning was about demand: would consumption grow fast enough to justify new capacity, and how would an aging fleet keep pace? That question has inverted. Demand is no longer the uncertain variable—it is the one thing forecasters are confident about. The uncertainty now sits […]

Facing potential supply constraints along the Makkah-Jeddah corridor, Saudi Arabia’s power sector compressed a combined cycle schedule by months driven by early alignment, staged authorization, and

At 4:30 a.m., before the sun is up, a lineworker steps onto a site that did not exist six months ago. By mid-morning, crews from three different contractors will be working in parallel: civil teams finishing trenching, electricians pulling cable, another crew preparing for energization. The schedule is tight. The handoffs are constant. On paper, […]

The conversation around electrification often centers on power generation and the grid capacity needed to support a more energy-intensive future. But an equally pressing challenge is emerging inside the

President Trump’s four nuclear executive orders issued on May 23, 2025, represented a historic liftoff for American nuclear energy. COMMENTARY As electricity demand surges, geopolitical energy competition intensifies, and America’s power infrastructure faces mounting strain, the administration acted decisively. It recognized that American energy dominance—and leadership in the digital age—requires a resurgence of nuclear reactor […]

A milder reliability assessment, 58 GW of new resources, and softening load forecasts have eased the near-term mood. Analysts and executives warn the breathing room is borrowed time. For the first time in

For decades, the pitch for community-owned electric utilities has been simple enough to fit on a bill insert: lower rates, reliable service, and decisions made close to home. The numbers still back that up. What has changed, according to Scott Corwin, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), is the difficulty of […]

Summer is the season utilities brace for. Demand peaks as air conditioners run flat out, equipment runs hot, and the workforce that keeps the grid alive does so under some of the year’s most punishing conditions. The same months that strain transformers and conductors also strain the people climbing structures and pulling cable beneath them. […]

Power demand across the U.S., particularly in Texas, continues to accelerate, driven by data center expansion, electrification trends and sustained industrial growth. Recent market analyses, including JLL’s data center outlook, show Texas accounting for more than one-third of the nation’s active data center construction pipeline, signaling a significant and sustained increase in electricity demand. To […]

Within a single week last month, Kairos Power broke ground on its Hermes 2 reactor in Tennessee, and days later TerraPower and Bechtel began construction on the Natrium reactor in Wyoming. Maria Korsnick, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), told industry leaders in Washington, D.C., at the Nuclear Energy Policy Forum on […]

Ontario took its most decisive step yet toward building Canada’s first large-scale nuclear station in more than three decades, directing the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to enter a cost-sharing and recovery agreement with Bruce Power to advance pre-construction work on the proposed Bruce C project. The agreement, announced on May 7 by Energy and […]

Across the power sector, plant owners are confronting a fundamental question: how long can existing assets continue to operate safely and economically? What was once a long-range planning exercise has become an immediate strategic priority, driven by a convergence of market, operational, and policy pressures. Load demand is rising at a pace many utilities and […]

TerraPower’s Natrium reactor at Kemmerer, Wyoming, reached official construction start on April 23, 2026. Here’s a full timeline from ARDP selection to construction start. TerraPower on April 23, 2026, officially started construction on Kemmerer Unit 1, its flagship Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming—a milestone that marks the most consequential step yet in […]

The power industry is staring down a workforce crisis. An aging labor force is heading for the exits, new recruits aren’t arriving fast enough to replace them, and a historic wave of energy infrastructure investment is only widening the gap. Against that backdrop, a partnership between Stony Brook University and Haugland Group—an infrastructure services company […]

While artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has spread rapidly, meaningful productivity gains remain elusive because organizations have conflated easy-to-deploy horizontal AI tools with the domain-specific

  See how AI is transforming combined cycle power plants! In this episode of AI in Action, discover how the Ovation™ Virtual Advisor and Ovation AI Agents help operators quickly analyze alarms and speed up startup processes. It’s a real-world look at how artificial intelligence boosts performance and decision-making across operations, improving situational awareness, reducing […]

With retirements outpacing new entrants and data centers driving unprecedented demand for electricity, the power generation sector faces a critical inflection point in workforce development. The U.S. power industry is confronting a workforce challenge unlike any it has faced in decades. An aging workforce is accelerating toward retirement, taking with it irreplaceable institutional knowledge and […]

As global electricity demand surges 40% by 2035 and warming projections worsen, nuclear, geothermal, gas, offshore wind, storage, and fusion must all advance—along with the workforce to build them. The global energy landscape is undergoing its most significant transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Electricity demand is surging at unprecedented rates while the imperative to decarbonize […]

Imagine a city going dark, not from a hurricane or a cyberattack, but because there weren’t enough skilled workers to restore power after a routine failure. While utilities scramble to fill critical roles, hyperscale data centers are hiring the same talent at premium salaries. The grid’s biggest vulnerability isn’t hardware; it’s a talent war that utilities are losing.

Recent breakthroughs at U.S. fusion labs, along with new public-private partnerships, are bringing us closer than ever to realizing fusion energy’s limitless potential. However, the U.S. has a major gap to fill in fusion research and development (R&D), and workforce development.

The power industry’s ambitious expansion plans for 2026 face an unexpected obstacle that has nothing to do with technology, regulations, or capital: there simply aren’t enough skilled workers to build and