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Government Affairs News

The People Who Will Build America’s Energy Future are Already Training in Dayton

Oct 26, 2026
By David Long, CEO, National Electrical Contractors Association

Nearly every week now brings another announcement. A new reactor. A new data center campus. A new factory coming back to American soil. The demand for electricity, and for the people who deliver it, is growing faster than at any point in a generation.

Those announcements share something that rarely makes the press release. None of them gets built without electricians. Opportunity without a workforce is just a backlog.

This summer, the U.S. Department of Energy came to Dayton, Ohio, to see where that workforce comes from. Associate Deputy Secretary Alex Fitzsimmons joined Sen. Bernie Moreno and electrical industry leaders for a day that moved from a contractor’s prefabrication floor to an apprenticeship classroom to a pole yard where line apprentices were climbing in the heat.

At ESI’s Innovation Center, the delegation saw how electrical contractors are using prefabrication to deliver projects faster and with fewer people on site. At the Dayton Electrical Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee, contractors sat down with federal officials to work through what is slowing projects down: permitting, supply chains, domestic manufacturing capacity, and above all the shortage of trained hands. At the American Line Builders Apprenticeship and Training facility, apprentices showed what it takes to build and maintain the lines that carry power from where it is generated to where it is needed.

Both officials came to Dayton with the same question: whether the training pipeline can keep pace with what the country is asking of it. Fitzsimmons made clear that the Department of Energy sees workforce as part of its energy dominance agenda, not a side issue, and that the Dayton model is the kind it wants to see grow. Moreno tied it to Ohio’s own comeback, from new chip plants to data centers, none of which gets built without the electricians training in rooms like the ones he visited.

What the delegation saw in Dayton was not a pilot or a proposal. It was a system that already works. Through NECA’s partnership with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, electrical contractors run the largest privately funded apprenticeship program in the country, training electricians in the classroom and on the job, at no cost to the taxpayer. The American Line Builders program alone has grown from 800 apprentices in 2018 to more than 2,000 today.

That system is now being asked to do more than it ever has. The federal government is one of our industry’s largest customers, and its demand is only growing. The National Nuclear Security Administration just completed the first phase of its Kansas City National Security Campus expansion and plans to begin a new phase every year into the 2030s. That is more than a decade of steady work for skilled electricians on a single federal campus. Multiply it across the reactors, transmission lines, and data centers now in the pipeline and the scale of the challenge is clear.

Washington has started to recognize this. The Department of Labor has begun investing directly in manufacturing apprenticeships. The Department of Energy is moving faster than it has in decades to get new generation built. What is missing is the connection between the two: a federal commitment to training the electricians who will build what DOE is approving.

NECA is ready to make that connection. Our training partners have the facilities, the instructors, and the track record. What we are proposing is a pilot, developed with DOE, to build the nuclear workforce the next wave of projects will require. The infrastructure to deliver it is already standing in places like Dayton.

Visits like this one do something a policy paper cannot. They put the people making decisions in Washington face to face with the people doing the work. We are grateful to Deputy Secretary Fitzsimmons and Senator Moreno for making the trip, and we hope more of their colleagues follow.

The future of American energy will be decided in Washington. It will be built in places like Dayton. NECA contractors are ready.