Dear Aventine Readers, 

One of the downstream effects of the skyrocketing demand for electricity is a corresponding demand for people who can build and maintain systems that produce it, namely … electricians. And thanks to a handful of factors — prioritizing four-year college degrees, a crackdown on  immigration and fewer lifetime workers among them — there is a dwindling supply. In this issue we look at the circumstances that led us here, and various steps that might help solve the problem. 

Also in this issue: 

Thanks for reading! 

Danielle Mattoon
Executive Editor, Aventine

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The world is going electric. Or at least it will if we can find people to rewire it.

Data centers are popping up everywhere, electric vehicles are proliferating, air conditioning demand is soaring and heat pumps are exploding in popularity. And almost all new infrastructure uses electricity as a primary energy source in unprecedented ways. As a result, global electricity demand increased by 4.3 percent in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, nearly double the pace in 2023. 

Yet there’s a fundamental problem facing a future built on electricity: The world doesn’t have enough electricians to build it. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be 81,000 electricians openings and 10,700 power line technician openings each year through 2034, with both occupations expected to grow far faster than the national average.

Emerging trends are adding pressure. The International Council on Clean Transportation estimates that EV charging alone will require an additional 60,000 workers in the U.S. for electrical installation, maintenance and repair through 2032 compared to the number working in the field today. In areas like Northern Virginia, Arizona and Texas, where data center clusters and EV corridors converge, local labor capacity could become a severe bottleneck.

Business leaders are taking notice. “I’ve … told members of the Trump team that we’re going to run out of electricians,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said at an energy conference in Houston earlier this year. “We just don’t have enough.” Microsoft's vice chair and president Brad Smith has bemoaned the fact that “we don’t have a national strategy to recruit and train the people to fill these jobs.” 

Experts told Aventine that meeting the challenge will require a multifaceted approach: enterprising ways to train and deploy workers more quickly, bigger financial commitments from the government, guarantees from employers that jobs will exist for graduates, more flexible ways of accrediting talent and better strategies for tempting workers into — and keeping workers in — the trade. “It's a very complex problem,” said Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “We really have to figure out how to deal with these challenges.”

How to make electricians 

The dominant pathway into the trade is the registered apprenticeship: four to five years of structured on-the-job training with a mentor, paired with classroom instruction, often at a community or technical college. Apprentices earn a wage from day one, with pay rising as they progress toward becoming full-fledged electricians. Training can be undertaken through union or nonunion programs and obtaining credentials can be critical. Federally funded public charging stations, for example, must be installed by technicians certified by the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program or graduates of registered apprenticeships with charger-specific training.

An employer typically pays the wages and benefits of the apprentices and mentors, while federal and state governments support these programs through a combination of wage reimbursement to the company, classroom tuition, and additional support to cover costs such as tools, transport and supplies.

The Biden-Harris administration invested more than $730 million over several years to expand the capacity of the Registered Apprenticeship system. More recently, President Trump has set a goal of having at least 1 million active apprentices, so far committing $84 million in grants to be distributed among 50 states and  $12.5 million of funding each to Alabama and Colorado. The number of registered apprentices rose from about 318,000 in 2014 to over 680,000 in 2024, but Robert I. Lerman, who co-founded Apprenticeships for America, an apprentice advocacy group, argued recently in Washington Monthly that resources are “hardly sufficient.” 

Funding is only part of the challenge. “It’s not that easy to push up the volume of people going through registered apprenticeships,” said Dale Belman, a labor economist at Michigan State University. Programs are limited by mentor capacity, classroom space and prosaic but important issues like supplying trainees with tools and transport. Expanding significantly would also require “clarity on what the scale and permanence of the demand is,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin. Without reliable signals that employers will keep hiring from these programs, training providers are reluctant to ramp up.

Alternative routes to boost capacity

Not all new electricians need to be teenagers starting from scratch. Reskilling workers from industries like mining, auto parts or the military can accelerate entry, since such people often bring transferable skills. Programs like Helmets to Hardhats and the Veterans Electrical Entry Program (VEEP), both nonprofits, are already helping veterans move into apprenticeships at advanced stages, earning higher wages sooner. Many community colleges are also working to  validate informal skills through credentials that could be used to get jobs, said Smith.

Apprenticeship models themselves could adapt. Today, for instance, there is no dedicated pathway for EV charging technicians: Candidates must first complete a full electrical program and then add charger-specific training. But in practice, charging technicians may not need much of  the training a generalist requires, said Dresser. Shorter, faster apprenticeships for narrowly defined roles could get more people into the field more quickly.

Another way to boost the number of credentialed workers is to rethink the scope of certain jobs. HVAC technicians, for example, could be trained to perform limited electrical tasks that are currently reserved for licensed electricians, which would free up electricians for complex jobs. That would require updating curricula and licensing rules, though, which could take years to become standard practice. Licensing is itself another source of friction: “You can’t just go to another state and say, ‘I’m a licensed electrician,’” said Belman. Economists have shown that state-specific licensing requirements reduce interstate migration of workers by more than a third for licensed occupations. Creating national, rather than state-by-state licensing requirements could help relieve regional bottlenecks.

Finally, making electricians more productive during their time at work could allow them to get more done. Increased use of prefabricated units and modular systems along with greater use of standardized designs could make the work of an on-site electrician more efficient. While there was a time when labor unions were “inherently suspicious” of productivity improvements, said Belman, that’s no longer the case, as higher productivity typically means higher wages.

Finding and keeping talent

All the training initiatives in the world can’t overcome one major issue facing jobs in trade industries: “People really don’t want to do those jobs,” said Smith.

In a 2025 survey of US 18- to 20-year-olds by the workplace software firm Jobber, 71 percent of respondents said they believe vocational school carries more stigma than college, and 63 percent of parents agreed. A big part of the problem may be lack of awareness: While four-year college was encouraged in high school for 76 percent of respondents, only 31 percent said trade school was promoted. Misperceptions about low pay are common, even though the median wage for a US electrician is  $62,350 a year, more than 20 percent above the national median for all US jobs. 

Opening the field up to women would also help. Less than 3 percent of electricians in the US are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meaning the trade is missing half the potential workforce. “We have to start earlier,” said Smith. “Young girls need to know that you can take the road less traveled.”

Then there’s immigration. Roughly a quarter of US electricians are Hispanic or Latino, according to BLS. Smith worries that restrictive immigration policies could shrink the pipeline unless training ramps up in parallel. “Once you close that [immigration] door, you should immediately be opening a door to training,” she said.

Retaining talent inside the profession will also be important. Unionized electricians once stayed in the trade for life, supported by pensions and strong benefits. Today, with more people working in nonunion jobs without such benefits, there’s less of an incentive to stick around. “We're telling them to take the job with all of the hard work, with less of the benefits,” said Smith. If policymakers want the workforce to grow, she argues, they need to rebuild the supports that keep skilled workers in the field. 

Gene therapy has successfully slowed Huntington's disease. A small clinical trial suggests a new gene therapy could dramatically slow the progression of Huntington’s disease, a fatal neurodegenerative condition that currently has no cure. The treatment, called AMT-130 and developed by the biotech company uniQure, targets an error in part of the DNA called the huntingtin gene. The error in that gene causes a toxic protein to accumulate in the brain. AMT-130 delivers genetic material directly into brain cells that cause them to produce molecules that can intercept and disable the production of that toxic protein. In a study led by Sarah Tabrizi at University College London, 17 patients received high-dose AMT-130 via a complex 12–18-hour brain surgery. Three years later, disease progression was on average 75 percent slower — based on a measure that considers cognitive, motor and daily functioning — compared with expected decline. The findings, first reported by the BBC, have not yet been peer reviewed. UniQure plans to apply for US regulatory approval in 2026, and while other scientists are cautiously excited about the therapy, they also warn that it could take as long as five years for the treatment to be licensed. And when it is available, it will almost certainly be expensive: Gene therapies already on the market typically cost millions of dollars.  

AI-designed, bacteria-killing viruses are now a thing. Scientists have used artificial intelligence to design viruses capable of killing E. coli, which Nature reports is the first example of AI writing usable sequences of DNA that make up an entire genome. A team at Stanford University and the nonprofit biomedical research organization Arc Institute trained an AI model called EVO on the genetic sequences of around two million known viruses so that it could generate new genetic sequences. In particular, the team was focused on bacteriophages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria, and they used the system to generate thousands of candidate sequences based around a well-studied bacteriophage called phiX174. Researchers synthesized 302 of the AI-generated DNA sequences and found that 16 could infect and destroy E. coli bacteria. The results, shared on the preprint server bioRxiv, have not yet been peer reviewed. The hope is that the work could eventually lead to new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections that plague crops and humans. But it also raises biosecurity concerns: AI could, intentionally or accidentally, be used to design harmful viruses. The researchers say they “deliberately withheld” data on viruses that infect humans for that reason. While this is a small step toward AI fully synthesising new forms of life, that will be a very long road: phiX174 has just 11 genes and about 5,000 DNA letters, compared to the more than 20,000 genes and roughly 3 billion DNA letters in a human.

“Living” electronics could help repair nervous systems. Medical implants like pacemakers or deep-brain stimulators can mimic the body’s electrical signals, but they often fail over time as the immune system reacts, creating  scar tissue that interferes with how they work. That’s why, as New Scientist explains, researchers are experimenting with “living electronics” that blend biology and hardware, with the hope of  sidestepping the body’s defenses. One approach that has shown promise is to incorporate living cells into devices in order to trick the body into accepting  the implants as natural. The University of Cambridge tried this approach with rats, implanting electrodes coated with stem cells into a rodent’s forearm. The implanted cells grew into muscle cells, and the rat's own neurons grew into those muscle structures, creating a biological bridge between the two. The Cambridge team believes this approach could be used to completely bridge a severed nerve, restoring both movement and sensation, and hopes to build a prototype within three to five years. Another approach is to create implants that are made entirely from human cells. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, are developing implants that are effectively blocks of gel loaded with neurons. When implanted, these neurons grow long axons, and the hope is that they could be used to reconnect sections of the brain that have been separated through trauma. The experiments are still in early stages, but they hint at a future in which implants don’t just sit in the body but instead integrate with it, lasting longer and repairing damage in ways today’s devices can’t.

My mom and Dr. DeepSeek, from Rest of World
2,700 words, or about 11 minutes

A fascinating story about how AI chatbots are changing people’s relationship with their health in potentially dangerous ways. Journalist Viola Zhou recounts what happened when her mother, who lives in a small town in China, began to favor the medical guidance of DeepSeek over her doctor’s. Her mother’s physician, whom she must travel hours to see, can only spend minutes with her, while DeepSeek was endlessly understanding and available, answering questions whenever asked. “DeepSeek is more humane,” the author’s mother writes at one point. “Doctors are more like machines.”  But while chatbots can make patients feel listened to and cared for, their advice can be dangerously wrong. When the author shared some of DeepSeek’s advice to her mother with physicians in New York and Michigan, one doctor described it as “sort of gibberish,” citing invented blood tests and potentially harmful treatments that blended reality with hallucination. While AI systems may be able to ace medical exams under controlled conditions, this story reveals that they flounder in the messy reality of individual patients. 

Liberté, égalité, radioactivité, from Works in Progress, and Why nuclear is now a booming industry, from The Economist
3,700 words, or about 15 minutes, and 1,400 words, or about 7 minutes

For a lesson in how to deploy nuclear energy at scale, look to France in the 1980s. In a single decade, the country went from 15 reactors to 55. Today, nuclear power still provides about 70 percent of France’s electricity and makes it Europe’s largest exporter of power. Works in Progress describes France’s approach, and what other nations hoping to build out nuclear power in the coming years can learn from it. France built its nuclear capacity by standardizing designs, commissioning reactors in batches, streamlining regulation and ensuring steady work for suppliers. It also taxed plant operators in a way that funneled money into local communities, helping sustain political support. No nation has since developed reactors as fast, but that could soon change. As The Economist notes, China and South Korea have borrowed from the French playbook, delivering new reactors in about five years and largely on budget. China’s huge, predictable demand for power gives it an added advantage. The question now is whether Western nations can replicate the strategy that enabled France’s rapid buildout, or whether its nuclear surge will remain unique in energy history.

How we came to know Earth, from Quanta
30,000 words, or about two hours, across nine long stories

No single person can grasp all the science needed to understand our planet. To do so requires understanding the quantum physics of greenhouse gases, chaos theory in weather, AI models of climate impacts, and the energy requirement of humans and nature, among other subjects. It is no surprise that people refer to the study of climate as the biggest scientific collaboration in history. This package of stories from Quanta digs into this vast enterprise, exploring how scientists have pieced together our understanding of Earth. A particular favorite is this piece about the evolution of mathematical models of weather and climate. Over the past 60 years, researchers have refined what to include — and just as crucially, what to leave out — in order to capture the dynamics of the atmosphere. Those models, once crude, now generate detailed re-creations of the entire planet. As one researcher put it to Quanta, a simulation of Earth now “demonstrates the beautiful complexity that we’re located in.”