Every few weeks brings another announcement. Eaton is investing roughly $340 million in a South Carolina transformer plant expected to begin production in 2027. Manufacturers are expanding across multiple countries at once, with well over a billion dollars in announced North American expansion.
And the same analysis documenting those investments concludes that current plans will not close the US supply imbalance within five years.
I want to make an argument about why, and it is not primarily about capital.
Capital is the easy part
Announcing a plant is a financing decision, and financing for grid equipment is available. Site selection, permitting, and construction follow known paths. Equipment can be ordered, though some of it carries its own long lead times.
What is not available on a known path is the leadership team.
A transformer plant needs a plant manager who runs transformer production, not general manufacturing. It needs winding supervisors, core assembly leaders, tank fabrication and welding leadership, a quality organization fluent in the applicable IEEE and ANSI requirements, and test engineers who can run acceptance testing. It needs a training organization, because the hourly workforce does not exist locally and must be built.
After roughly two decades in which around 80 percent of large power transformers used in the US were imported, that domestic experience base is thin. It did not disappear, but it concentrated in a small number of facilities, and everyone expanding is recruiting from the same places.
The timing mistake
The pattern I see is a company that announces a plant, hires a project director to build it, and starts hiring operating leadership when the building is nearly finished.
That is backward, and the cost shows up as ramp time.
A plant manager hired eighteen months before startup influences layout, equipment selection, process design, and staffing model. A plant manager hired at startup inherits decisions they would not have made and spends a year working around them.
More importantly, that person hires and trains everyone else. If they arrive late, the whole hiring cascade arrives late, and the plant opens with a building that works and a workforce that does not.
The searches themselves are slow. Specialized manufacturing leadership at this level means a small candidate pool, mostly employed and not looking, with relocation conversations involving families. Six months from kickoff to start date is a good outcome, not a fast one.
What I would do differently
Three recommendations for anyone with an announced expansion.
Hire the plant leader before you break ground, not before you open. The eighteen-month version of that role is a materially different and more valuable job than the day-one version.
Build the training function early. If you are creating hundreds of hourly positions in skills that do not exist in the local labor market, the training program is a product you must build, and it needs a leader and a curriculum.
Look wider than your own sector. Transformer-specific experience is scarce, but adjacent heavy electrical manufacturing, motors and generators, and large fabrication all produce leaders who translate. I would rather place a strong operations leader from an adjacent sector eighteen months early than a perfect-fit candidate three months late.
How TYGES can help
We place plant managers, manufacturing and process engineers, quality leadership, and production supervision into electrical equipment manufacturers, including greenfield and expansion sites.
Because the transformer-native pool is small, most of our successful placements in this space come from adjacent heavy electrical and large fabrication environments, where the operations judgment transfers and the candidates are not being called by every competitor weekly. We also handle the relocation conversation early, since that is where these searches most often stall.
If you have an expansion with a 2028 or 2029 production date, the leadership search belongs on this year’s calendar. Tell us the startup date and we will build the hiring sequence backward from it, starting with the person who will hire everyone else.
