By Jennifer Hiller | Photography by Jeremy M. Lange for WSJ

SOUTH BOSTON, Va. -- In a factory not far from the North Carolina state line, Robin Cisco walks her fingers across hundreds of feet of paper-insulated copper wire.

Cisco is a "winder" at Hitachi Energy's transformer factory in southern Virginia where she twists wire by hand around a giant cylinder. The pattern will eventually create the heart of an electric transformer that takes four to six weeks to build and is the size of a small garage. Soaring demand means the wait list for the crucial equipment is yearslong.

The growth of the U.S. electric grid depends on factory workers like Cisco, whose craft can take three to five years to master and can't be fully automated. The manual precision and specialty materials required are among many reasons that the U.S. is struggling to meet the surging electricity needs of the artificial-intelligence frenzy.

"Believe me when I say that they are artists," Anthony Allard, head of North America for Hitachi Energy, said of winders. "This is an extremely manual job because they have to be extremely precise in the way they do it. If not, there will be some issue later down the road with the equipment."

Transformers are used to step up voltage from power plants to send electricity onto the grid, or to step down voltage so it can be used by cities, neighborhoods and large customers such as factories, data centers and oil-and-gas facilities. New ones are needed every time a new source of power generation or a big customer connects to the grid.

They can be as large as buildings or as small as garbage cans. The ones made in South Boston can weigh up to 285,000 pounds, roughly the equivalent of 24 elephants or 65 pickup trucks.

Orders for larger transformers have exceeded supply by about 14,000 units this year, according to Wood Mackenzie. Similar labor and supply-chain hurdles are slowing the construction of natural-gas-fired power plants and gas turbines, which have a yearslong backlog.

The South Boston factory, which already has three shifts, is expanding. Construction has also begun on a new $457 million facility in an adjacent field, where Hitachi Energy will make even bigger transformers beginning in 2028.

A potential bottleneck: hiring around 800 more workers, including winders, in a county with a population of about 34,000.

Settling into her role as a winder took Cisco about a year. "I still have my days," said Cisco, who is 65 years old and has worked at the South Boston factory for nearly 15 years. "That's the first thing I tell my trainees: This job is not for everyone."

Working nearby, winder Derrick Petty said he is still learning the quirks of the job after a year at Hitachi Energy and 14 years at another transformer factory.

"This is not like a hamburger joint," Petty said. "These aren't cookie-cutter coils. No two people and no two coils are alike. I've seen people come in here -- and walk away."

Pay for manufacturing jobs at the South Boston factory starts at $19.33 to $24 an hour, approaching the county's median household income of about $49,200, according to 2023 census estimates.

Marissa Emerman, who started at the factory in October as a first-assembly manufacturing associate and was taping cables on a recent afternoon, said the role was intimidating at first -- but it pays $4 more an hour than her previous position as a manager of the local animal shelter.

When friends and family ask her what she does, Emerman tells them she works on a bigger version of "the green boxes we sat on as kids that we probably should not have been sitting on," she said. "Now I know better."

Current flows through transformers similarly to water between larger and smaller pipes. After winding, the copper coils are lowered by crane around a magnetic core made from hundreds of stacked sheets of millimeters-thin electrical steel. It is the path of the coil as copper twists and turns that converts the voltage from high to low -- or low to high -- as current flows by mutual induction.

The end product is a hulking gray, steel box that holds nine to 12 windings -- a total of about 9 miles of copper that would stretch the length of 160 football fields.

Smaller distribution transformers -- mounted on pads or poles to help deliver power to neighborhoods and businesses -- face an even greater supply crunch. Wood Mackenzie pegs this year's shortage at about 123,000.

Those transformers are produced in factories that can churn out hundreds of pieces of equipment a day thanks to some automation, though they, too, require hands-on labor and designs vary from customer to customer.

The U.S. will import 80% of its needed large power transformers this year and half of its distribution transformers.

Manufacturers in the power industry had little reason to boost output until recently because electricity demand was mostly stagnant in the two decades before 2020.

Now, it is expected to surge 25% between 2023 and 2030, according to consulting firm ICF, largely thanks to data centers and industrial growth. The Energy Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab expect data centers to consume as much as 12% of the country's electricity by 2028.

For transformers of all sizes, sourcing additional materials such as grain-oriented electrical steel and high-purity, insulated copper wire is difficult, as is increasing factory output and hiring, said Benjamin Boucher, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie.

"Transformers require very technical labor, but we just don't have enough of that these days," Boucher said.

Write to Jennifer Hiller at jennifer.hiller@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 16, 2025 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

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