A year after Kiewit Power Constructors started on site, the Homer City Energy Campus in western Pennsylvania has more than 2,000 tradespeople and contractors at work. Owner Homer City Generation said Oct. 20 that most were hired from inside the state, in a Business Wire release marking Kiewit’s anniversary as EPC contractor.
That headcount has doubled in seven months. The project crossed 1,000 workers in late March, reached more than 1,800 by early September and hit the 2,000 mark the company had forecast for year-end about two months early.
How the Homer City workforce was built
The September update put more than 135 apprentices on the job and said about 95% of direct-hire craft workers were local. Nine union trades are represented: boilermakers, carpenters, electricians, ironworkers, laborers, millwrights, operators, pipefitters and teamsters. The October release doesn’t update the apprentice count or local share, so treat those as September figures.
Western Pennsylvania had a head start. The site was a coal plant until its smokestacks and cooling towers came down in March 2025, and the region still has the boilermaker and pipefitter locals that kept plants like it running. “We cannot hire fast enough,” Shawn Steffee of Boilermakers Local 154 said in September. That’s the quote other megaproject owners should hear. Even in a region with a deep power-plant labor pool, a single job is absorbing workers as fast as the halls can dispatch them.
Safety record on a fast-growing jobsite
Homer City Generation reports zero OSHA-recordable incidents to date. That claim comes from the owner, not from OSHA data, and the release doesn’t give hours worked, so there’s no way to calculate a rate. The pace makes it stand out: crews finished demolition and excavation in June, ahead of schedule, after recycling more than 112,000 tons of scrap and moving about 3 million cubic yards of material. Robots handled part of the structural demolition.
Rapid headcount growth is when safety programs usually crack, because new hires are the ones most likely to get hurt. Holding a clean record while doubling the workforce is the more impressive number here, if it holds through the heavy mechanical phase.
Gas turbine and HRSG work drives the next hiring wave
Vertical construction started in April. The first two heat recovery steam generators are installed, and the first gas turbine is set on its foundation. The plant is planned around seven GE Vernova 7HA.02 turbines producing about 4.4 GW, which the developer calls the largest gas-fired plant under construction in the U.S. Knighthead Capital Management originated the project and leads its financing.
Six more turbines and their HRSGs mean the craft mix is shifting toward boilermakers, pipefitters, millwrights and electricians, the same trades data centers and factories are chasing. The developer projects more than 10,000 direct on-site construction jobs over the life of the project, including a planned data center campus, and about 1,000 permanent positions. Those projections come from a 2024 economic impact study the developer paid for.
Specialty contractors across the country already say they’re short. 62.6% of ENR’s Top 600 specialty contractors report craft shortages, and about three in four electrical firms do. Homer City shows what that looks like on one site: 2,000 workers and the hiring isn’t close to done.