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We need a lot more electricians if we’re going to electrify everything
By Emily Pontecorvo - Canary Media, January 11, 2023
The U.S. has a shortage of electricians to install clean equipment like EV chargers, heat pumps and induction stoves. Those who get into the field can earn big.
Chanpory Rith, a 42-year-old product designer at the software company Airtable, bought a house in Berkeley, California with his partner at the end of 2020. The couple wasn’t planning to buy, but when Covid hit and they began working from their one-bedroom San Francisco apartment, they developed a new hobby: browsing listings on Zillow and Redfin — “real estate porn,” as Rith put it.
Their pandemic fantasizing soon became a pandemic fairy tale: They fell for a five-bedroom midcentury home in the Berkeley hills with views of San Francisco Bay and put down an offer. “And then came the joys and tribulations of homeownership,” Rith said.
One of those tribulations began with a plan to install solar panels. Rith didn’t consider himself a diehard environmentalist, but he was concerned about climate change and wanted to do his part to help. He didn’t have a car but planned on eventually getting an electric vehicle and also wanted to swap out the house’s natural-gas appliances for electric versions. Getting solar panels would be a smart first step, he figured, because it might trim his utility bills. But Rith soon found out that the house’s aging electrical panel would need to be upgraded to support rooftop solar. And he had no idea how hard it would be to find someone to do it.
Many of the electricians Rith reached out to didn’t respond. Those who did were booked out for weeks, if not months. He said they were so busy that the conversations felt like interviews — as if he were being evaluated, to suss out whether his house was worth their time.
“It felt like trying to get your kid into a nice kindergarten, where you have to be interviewed and do a lot of things just to get on the radar of these electricians,” Rith told Grist.
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