Australia needs another 72,000 electricians, technicians and related tradespeople by 2030 to service data centre construction, the renewables rollout and the Housing Accord’s 1.2 million-home target. That’s according to a report released on Wednesday 2 September 2026 by the Powering Skills Organisation, the government-established jobs and skills body for the energy sector.
The PSO warned that competition for those workers, already tight, has been accelerated by the artificial intelligence build-out, ABC News reported. Treasury puts the value of data centre construction at about $150 billion by the end of the decade.
PSO chief executive Anthea Middleton said the same pool of tradespeople is now being pulled in several directions at once.
“We have multiple national priorities that are simultaneously competing for the same electricians, technicians and skilled trades workers,” she told the ABC.
“And we can see that this pressure is expected to persist over many years rather than follow a normal economic cycle.”
The forecast hole grew by 30,000 in a single year
Last year’s version of the same report put the energy workforce shortfall at 42,000. The 2026 figure is 72,000, so the forecast gap has widened by 30,000 in twelve months.
Data centres alone account for a further 13,000 energy trades workers in the report’s estimate. There were about 162 operational data centres in Australia as of March, with another 130 proposed.
In March the federal government set out national expectations for data centre and AI infrastructure developers, urging them to close skills gaps by investing in local workers through apprenticeships and other training pathways. Those are expectations, not conditions, and that distinction is the crux of the PSO’s complaint.
”Mind-boggling”: the squeeze on fixed-price contractors
The pinch is landing hardest on the businesses that can’t reprice a job when wages move. Dean Spicer runs a Melbourne business building the electrical cables used in data centres, and says his own staff are being snapped up by the projects his product goes into.
“It’s devastating because you’ve got a real opportunity to grow your business, but in the sector that we’re working in, often fixed-price, we’re unable to compete with the rates and conditions being offered in that space,” Spicer told the ABC.
“We’ve recently lost one of our team who’ve been with us for 12 years … some of the things they’re doing to attract staff are mind-boggling.”
That’s the arithmetic every small shop is doing right now. A fixed-price contract signed six months ago carries the labour rate that applied six months ago. A hyperscale project running to a live-date deadline can pay whatever it takes to keep the program moving, and the difference comes out of the smaller firm’s crew.
The quota call, and who wears the cost of training
Electrical apprenticeship completion rates are holding at 70 per cent, and demand for apprentices is still strong. Middleton’s argument is about who carries the cost of getting them there.
Small and medium businesses do the bulk of the training, she said, with large infrastructure projects then hiring those workers towards the end of their apprenticeship. A lack of guidelines requiring first- and second-year apprentices on major projects has “enabled a system of poaching”, she said, and the PSO wants first- and second-year quotas enforced on all major energy projects.
“I think we have an opportunity to leverage that investment to make sure that they are also investing in the Australian skills and employment outcomes for Australian workers,” she said.
National Electrical Communications Association chief executive Stewart Joyce wants a second mechanism alongside quotas: paying back the firms that lose people they trained.
“That smaller or medium-sized contractor is compensated for the time, because most of the cost and time and effort you put in to develop an apprentice … It’s not until the second and third year that they start to become … profitable to your business,” he said.
Joyce said housing construction will feel the data centre boom, and he struggled to see how the pipeline gets built without someone coordinating it.
“It’s very difficult to try and think the amount of electricians we’ve got at the moment are going to cover all of those projects all happening at the same time,” he said.
“I think the answer is somehow everybody needs to be able to talk and plan these projects so that we try to utilise the labour as best as possible, because there’s only a finite amount.”
What this looks like from the ute
For a sparkie weighing up a first-year, Joyce’s point is the whole story. Years one and two are a cost centre: supervision, off-the-job training blocks, someone senior standing next to them. The return arrives in years three and four, which is exactly when the big projects come knocking with a rate a domestic or small-commercial outfit can’t match on a signed price.
What a quota would change is the order of the queue. If a major energy or data centre project has to carry early-year apprentices on site, it trains its own instead of buying finished ones off the firms that did the work.
There is money already moving. The clean energy apprenticeship program launched in 2023 offers a $10,000 incentive for a full-time traineeship, and more than 26,000 Australians had commenced apprenticeships in the sector as of July, across solar, automotive, battery installation and electrical trades.
The number to watch is whether the government converts its March expectations for data centre developers into an actual apprenticeship condition on major projects. Until it does, the first- and second-year apprentice stays on the small employer’s books, and the housing pipeline keeps bidding for the same sparkies as a $150 billion data centre program.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Australia short of electricians?
Data centre construction, the renewables rollout and the Housing Accord’s 1.2 million-home target are all drawing on the same pool of electricians and technicians at once, according to the Powering Skills Organisation.
How much has the forecast electrician shortage grown?
The PSO’s 2026 report puts the shortfall at 72,000 workers by 2030, up from a 42,000 forecast in last year’s report, a jump of 30,000 in twelve months.
What is the PSO proposing to fix the shortage?
It wants first- and second-year apprentice quotas enforced on major energy and data centre projects, plus a mechanism to compensate small and medium firms when workers they trained are hired away by bigger projects.
Sourced from ABC News. Original article.
