On the banks of the Ohio River, just west of Pittsburgh, workers make steel tubes for giant utility-scale solar panels at a former Bethlehem Steel plant in Leetsdale. During World War II, the steel produced here would go on to be used in the production of tank landing ships. The facility today is home to JM Steel, and — unlike the sooty shop floor of its predecessor — this plant is clean.
Workers wear hard hats dotted with stickers earned for exhibiting exemplary workplace safety as they weld, shape and smooth steel pipes. The pipe is sold to a California-based energy technology company, Nextracker, and used to rotate solar panels, tracking them toward the sun in big solar farms all over the world. Every truckload of tubes JM Steel sends out goes toward producing about one megawatt of electricity, according to the company.
Last April, the JM Steel plant doubled its production and added 60 more workers to the payroll.
“I think we have a very large cross-section of people working here,” said Negley Rodgers, assistant vice president of operations at JM Steel. “Some have been involved in the past with Pittsburgh’s history and steelmaking. Some have never been in this environment at all. We’re new in general to this, this is a new process that wasn’t being done here. Nobody had made this product before. So, everybody’s new on the floor in some way.”
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These workers making low-carbon steel tubes are an example of just how much manufacturing in southwestern Pennsylvania has evolved over the past several decades. Once dominated by historic behemoths such as U.S. Steel and Alcoa, the region’s manufacturing sector is now largely made up of small and medium-sized companies employing fewer than 500 employees.
It’s also no longer your grandad’s industry. Automation and robotics have transformed the way factories work, making production more efficient but in some cases requiring workers to obtain new and more specialized training to operate the more complex machinery. Meanwhile, innovative training programs have helped to diversify the shop floor by drawing more women and minorities to the sector.
And while thoughts of the Pittsburgh region’s heavy industrial past might conjure images of belching smokestacks and shrouds of smoke that made noontime look more like midnight, the recent manufacturing boom has been spurred by a shift toward decarbonization and energy transition, providing southwestern Pennsylvania with an opportunity to become a hub for a new brand of manufacturing.
“Manufacturing looks a lot different than when my dad was in manufacturing,” said Rob Cherry, executive director of Partner4Work, Allegheny County’s workforce development organization. “He’d come into the house, have to leave his clothes in the hallway because they were so dirty. Manufacturing is very clean now. It is very automated as far as, you know, what workers are doing. And there’s definitely cleaner boots that walk into the house now.”
Energizing manufacturing
At its peak in 1952, the region’s manufacturing sector employed 379,000 people — which was 40% of all jobs in the region, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. “And that really meant that almost all of the economy was dependent on manufacturing in some sense,” said Chris Briem, regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research.
The bulk of the jobs back then were related to the steel industry. Today, manufacturing is spread across a wide range of industries. And — while the days of manufacturing dominating the regional economy may be long gone — it is still a $12 billion sector. In 2022, it counted almost 3,000 companies and 90,000 workers, according to a 2024 report from Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a regional economic development agency.
More recently, federal investments such as the Inflation Reduction Act, Chips and Science Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have fueled growth in domestic manufacturing in southwestern Pennsylvania and other regions historically associated with heavy industry. Much of that funding is focused on accelerating the country’s clean energy transition.
Among the regional investments those laws have made possible is a $62.7 million federal Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant, part of which is intended to help expand the use of robotics in manufacturing. And the Inflation Reduction Act has helped lift Eos Energy Enterprises’s $500 million expansion of its zinc battery manufacturing facility in Turtle Creek.
“The Inflation Reduction Act has helped a lot,” said Chris Bartley, director of utility sales at Nextracker. “While the fundamental economics of solar are very strong on their own, the IRA has helped significantly. This factory in Pittsburgh is a great example. And the other 20 plus factories we set up in the U.S. are other great examples of that.”
In October, Mainspring Energy got a $87 million grant from the Department of Energy through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build a linear generator manufacturing facility near the Pittsburgh International Airport. Linear generators have low-emissions and are designed as back-up generators or even a substitute for grid power for data centers. And they can run on a range of fuels from natural gas to hydrogen.
To get the grant, Mainspring had to build in a former coal community. They scouted locations in five different states before picking Pennsylvania. “We kind of looked at the map of coal-impacted communities and we overlaid it with areas where you have really strong workforce, really strong academic institutions like Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh,” said Craig Gordon, head of global policy and regulatory affairs at Mainspring Energy.
“One of the things that we’re very interested in in the Pittsburgh region, of course, is the ARCH2 hydrogen hub,” Gordon said. “We’ve already been talking to some of the companies that are involved directly in that hub. And we’re very much interested in seeing the advancement of hydrogen as a clean fuel to help power the grid in a decarbonized way.”
Demand for the type of cleaner electricity generation devices companies like Mainspring produce is only expected to grow. That’s because emerging data and artificial intelligence-related industries need a lot of power to keep plugging away. Their growth strains the electrical grid.
“The electrification of everything from the devices that we use in our home, how we keep our homes, how we plug in our vehicles,” said Susan Renda, vice president of human resources at Mitsubishi Electric Power Products (MEPPI) in Warrendale, which serves data centers among other customers. “There is just tremendous growth and a need for more electrical power. And then there’s the movement to clean and renewable generation — when people talk about solar, when they’ll talk about wind. All of this is helping to transform the grid.”
MEPPI announced it was investing $86 million to build a new factory in Warrendale to build circuit breakers for the grid in October. “The utility companies need to be responsive,” Renda said. “What our products do is they protect the equipment that the utility has on the grid so that electricity flows from where it’s generated to where it reaches your home and you turn on the switch and the light works.”
The decision to expand in southwestern Pennsylvania came down to support from the state, including a $4 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant and a $2.75 million Pennsylvania First grant from the Department of Community and Economic Development.
Cleaner boots
At the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood, a robotic arm draws precise lines of glue on the back of what looks like a circuit board. It then moves onto the next one and repeats the exact task, and again in a corner of the demo floor. The ARM Institute is a nonprofit that partners with researchers, government and companies to help them adopt “advanced” manufacturing tools — such as robotics and other tech — to improve their manufacturing processes. Researchers here are “de-risking” or testing different ways a robot, like the one applying glue to the circuit board, might make a client’s manufacturing line more efficient.
“This is not some dystopian lights out robot filled factory where there’s no people,” said Ira Moskowitz, CEO of the ARM Institute. “It’s completely the opposite. We need to upgrade the skills of people in factories so that not only are they doing more interesting jobs, [but] we’re taking full advantage of their brains and their creativity,” Moskowitz said. “We use robots to do those kinds of tasks that are either repetitive or dirty or dangerous, or require more precision and speed than humans can do to stay competitive.”
Most manufacturing these days is of the advanced variety, said Petra Mitchell, president and CEO at Hazelwood-based Catalyst Connection, a workforce training organization focused on advanced manufacturing. Part of its work is to try to extend opportunities to populations that are underrepresented in manufacturing. Only 21% of the manufacturing workforce in the region are women and 7% are non-white, Catalyst Connection data suggest.
The organization received a $2 million grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission to expand their apprenticeships and training programs in advanced manufacturing, in addition to Department of Labor grants focused specifically on women and people living in rural communities.
Entry-level production jobs such as a material handler working in packaging and shipping are often taught on the job. But middle-skill roles might require a certificate program, more support, deeper on-the-job training and previous experience — jobs like machine operators, machinists, welders, maintenance technicians, field service technicians and quality control technicians. These positions and the apprenticeship programs that train workers for them are in high demand, according to Mitchell.
“That bridge in between for folks is a really attainable credential or a skill that can be picked up in a short amount of time that pays family sustaining wages,” Cherry said. “Those middle-skill jobs, whether they’re in manufacturing or health care or any other sector, those are most of the jobs that are out here. They really are the backbone jobs of this particular region.”
The most popular program at Westmoreland County Community College’s Advanced Technology Center is welding. “We had five of our welding students hired by Siemens Energy right here in the RIDC plant before they even graduated,” said Rebecca Parker, the center’s director. “And they are traveling internationally, making huge money.”
While many of the manufacturing and technology programs the center offers aren’t new, Parker said they’ve grown in popularity. “We have been offering many of these programs for 30 years,” she said. “But I think just the trend in people seeing the value of manufacturing technology and the trades is coming to light.”
The Advanced Technology Center’s newest program is in additive manufacturing, which includes the process of 3D printing. “It is just growing by leaps and bounds,” Parker said. “It’s used in the medical field, education, aerospace, dental. We have people from dental labs visiting us. They’re making teeth right on the spot. They’re making body parts, joints for hip replacements and shoulder replacements.”
Growing manufacturing in the region
The appeal of building manufacturing jobs in a region is that they are likely to spawn more jobs in other industries — something economists call a multiplier effect. For example, a recent Allegheny Conference report found that every manufacturing job in southwestern Pennsylvania leads to about 2.6 other jobs.
“For every manufacturing job, every company needs accounting services, every company needs legal services,” Mitchell said. “So those are sort of like some of the indirect effects. Also, you know, if you have a major manufacturing facility in a community, all of a sudden now they go out to lunch. So you need more diners and restaurants or coffee shops.”
But transforming a sector is a delicate balance — companies are attracted to a spot with trained workers, but if the jobs don’t arrive on time, the local workers move away.
“It’s a challenge,” said Pitt’s Briem. “If you don’t have all the jobs to fill them, you could run the risk [of losing workers]. And that’s true of other fields training folks who will have great job opportunities just not here.
“One of the greater threats to the region’s high-tech workforce is only a few hours away — the big plant that’s opening up outside Columbus [Ohio],” Briem said. “It’s going to be a big Intel plant. That plant is going to have a relatively enormous demand for workers. And they’re not going to be able to fill those workers from there. So, they’re going to be pulling in from a lot of nearby regions. And we happen to be a place that’s relatively close.”
Wait and see
At Wabtec’s remanufacturing facility in Grove City, Pa. — about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh — dirty, old diesel locomotive engines are dismantled, cleaned and refurbished so as to comply with current EPA standards. The restored engines are then reassembled on the shop floor before they are sent back out on the rails.
“If I set a new engine and a remanufactured engine next to you, you couldn’t look at it and tell the difference if you didn’t read the serial numbers,” said Tom Chill, senior director of technical product management at Wabtec on a tour of the facility.
Chill remembers teaching his team how to use email decades ago and now, “on the shop floor, these folks are interacting with computers, you know, seamlessly all day long,” Chill said. “And it’s all about the data in this shop. We’re collecting data, we’re presenting data, we’re analyzing data. And the workforce is just extremely capable at doing that.”
The refurbished engines are more fuel efficient and give off fewer emissions, while still generating the same amount of horsepower — all thanks, Chill said, to improved manufacturing processes. The engines then need to be tested once restoration is complete. So the company built test cells at the facility and attached alternators to them. When they run the diesel engines to test them out, they generate “enormous amounts of power that we are able to put back onto the grid and recapture that, with the hopes that someone else has to make less power.”
If the trends currently driving the region’s revamped manufacturing sector continue apace, southwestern Pennsylvania’s industrial future is likely to follow Wabtec’s lead — toward more energy-efficient processes and products. However, much of that will depend on the state and federal government’s appetite for continued investment in the country’s transition to cleaner energy.
In December, EOS Energy Enterprises scored a $303.5 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to shore up two automated production lines to make zinc-powered batteries in Turtle Creek — enough to power 300,000 homes at once by 2026, according to the DOE.
But political challenges could defuse manufacturing’s momentum. Incoming President Donald Trump has vowed to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed without a single Republican vote in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. About 80% of new clean energy manufacturing investments since the act passed in 2022 have been in Republican congressional districts, according to Atlas Public Policy, an economic policy research group.
“Unfortunately, energy has become very politicized in the last 10 or 15 years and we need to get away from that as soon as we can,” said Mainspring Energy’s Gordon. “Because our livelihoods and future depend on it. And we need to decarbonize quickly. We need to do it in a way that’s not acrimonious. But we need to do it in a way that’s safe and affordable and shows a throughline to a clean outcome for our energy system.”
