Westinghouse may build facility in western Pennsylvania
PITTSBURGH (AP) – Westinghouse Electric Corp. is tentatively planning to open a new engineering facility in western Pennsylvania, bringing 1,000 to 2,000 new jobs to the area, a company spokesman said Wednesday. The nuclear energy company was considering sites in seven states before choosing the region over the Charlotte, N.C., area, said Vaughn Gilbert, a Westinghouse spokesman.
The company has not finalized the plan, but expects to make an official announcement by the end of December, he said.
The facility would be built in Cranberry, a Pittsburgh suburb, or added to the company’s Monroeville headquarters. It would house engineering personnel working primarily on new nuclear plants to be built in the U.S., Europe and Asia, Gilbert said.
Japanese electronics maker Toshiba Corp. bought Westinghouse earlier this year as part of an effort to become the world’s top nuclear power company. The company has already started hiring for the new positions, and the employees will work at existing buildings until the new facility is established, Gilbert said. The workers will be involved in the design of the new plants as well as project management and procurement, he said. Computer programmers and accountants will also be hired.
Westinghouse looked into basing the operation at sites in Connecticut, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia or Georgia before narrowing the choices to western Pennsylvania and the Charlotte, N.C., area.
Criteria included proximity to a major airport, sufficient space to accommodate the new facility and parking, and tax and financial incentives.
Westinghouse had strong support from Gov. Ed Rendell, who signed tax abatement legislation recently that made the state “very competitive with the Carolinas,” along with members of the local business community and others, Gilbert said.
The work force growth comes amid a period of attrition at the company, which expanded rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s before reaching a plateau. A significant number of its employees are eligible or will soon become eligible for retirement.
Westinghouse already employs about 3,000 people in western Pennsylvania. It hired 800 people last year and plans to hire a total of 900 new workers this year and 500 people annually over the next four to five years, Gilbert said. It has 9,200 employees worldwide.
The expansion was spurred, in part, by the comeback of the nuclear power industry, which has pitched itself as being price-competitive with fossil fuels and as making electricity without greenhouse gases.
News of the expansion was first reported Wednesday by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Westinghouse has been selected to build 12 of 16 new nuclear power plants in the United States.
Those plants are slated to come online 2013 or 2014, according to Gilbert.
It is also pursuing contracts in China, where new plants would be built sooner, as well as South Africa, the United Kingdom and other parts of the world, he said.
“The new plant market is one that is fast becoming real,” Gilbert said.
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Westinghouse Electric Corp: http://www.westinghouse.com/