Southern Arizona already has the industrial base many regions spend years trying to attract. Aerospace and defense companies have operated there for decades, supported by Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and a workforce accustomed to highly technical work.
Dallas Dukes, senior vice president of customer and strategy affairs at Tucson Electric Power, puts the scale at more than 200 local companies connected to aerospace and more than 30,000 workers across Southern Arizona. Raytheon remains one of the region’s largest employers, and Bombardier is among the companies with an established presence.
That history gives Tucson something valuable as aerospace manufacturing becomes more automated and energy-intensive. Companies arriving today don’t have to wait for every supporting piece to be built around them.
The harder question is how quickly those pieces can change.
Large industrial customers want power sooner than traditional utility planning often allowed. Employers need workers trained on equipment that may not have existed when a college program was designed. Southern Arizona’s response has increasingly depended on shortening the time between an industry need and the infrastructure or training built around it.
Lea Márquez Peterson sees that pressure from the Arizona Corporation Commission, where she regulates investor-owned utilities. Growth is welcome, she said, but utilities still have to make investments without leaving existing customers responsible for unnecessary infrastructure.
“I think from a regulatory perspective we need to show that we have regulatory certainty for our utilities that are growing and investing, that we’re balanced, we’re focused on reliability and also the affordability of rates and that we’re pro business,” Peterson said.
Keeping that balance is becoming part of Southern Arizona’s industrial pitch.
Power Has to Be Ready Early
Advanced manufacturers can be demanding electricity customers even when their total consumption is modest compared with a hyperscale data center.
The machines inside a precision manufacturing facility may need electricity delivered within a very tight range. Dukes said that puts power quality alongside reliability when TEP works with manufacturers.
“When you get into those kind of industries it’s not just about reliability it’s also about the power quality,” he said.
Southern Arizona already has high-voltage infrastructure that allows many of those customers to connect to a sturdy part of the grid, and Dukes said manufacturing projects under roughly 50 megawatts can often be accommodated relatively quickly in established areas.
The planning changes when electricity demand grows much larger.
Utilities historically worked with long transmission timelines because load growth was easier to project. TEP now has to prepare for companies that may want substantial amounts of power sooner than a new transmission project can normally be built.
Dukes said the utility has begun doing more work before a customer is fully committed, including early land procurement and site planning. That gives TEP a head start without requiring it to build every possible project in advance.
“What might have taken us five, seven years to do … we’re trying to pull that back into two, three year kind of windows,” he said.
Peterson’s job is partly to make sure that faster planning does not turn into speculative spending paid for by other customers.
“As regulators, it’s really important that the utilities don’t overbuild,” she said. “They’re building the necessary infrastructure for whatever projects are coming.”
TEP is also changing the resources behind that grid. Dukes said the utility recently brought more than 400 megawatts of four-hour battery storage into service alongside a similar amount of solar generation. Storage has become more useful as electricity demand stretches later into the evening, though he noted that four-hour batteries do not always cover the entire period when the system is tightest.
Industrial customers are adding another complication because they increasingly arrive with their own requirements for how electricity is produced. Some want renewable power tied closely to corporate targets. Others put more weight on keeping electricity inexpensive.
Dukes jokingly described the result as “concierge, cafeteria plan power structures.” For TEP, satisfying those requests still has to work within a regulated system built to serve everyone.
Training in Months
Pima Community College faces similar pressure to move quickly. Chancellor Dr. Jeff Nasse said the college works with more than 800 industry partners that help shape what students learn and how programs are built.
“We have over eight hundred industry partners and they really shape, you know, how we’re delivering education and how we’re thinking about that,” Dr. Nasse said.
Advanced manufacturing has become one of the areas where that relationship shows up most clearly. Pima trains students on robotics and automated industrial systems, while its aviation technology program operates out of a 97,000-square-foot facility and feeds workers into employers including Bombardier.
Cybersecurity has become the college’s fastest-growing program as digital systems spread into jobs that once would have been viewed as largely mechanical.
Dukes said Pima’s ability to build shorter training programs is especially useful when an employer cannot wait several years for a conventional academic program to produce graduates.
“You develop those programs in partnership with those industry leaders, those companies, but you also do it in a way that’s agile, really fast,” he told Dr. Nasse.
In some cases, Dukes said, that means training people in three or four months and letting more of their development continue on the job.
Dr. Nasse sees the same urgency among workers who already have careers. About 30% of Pima students are between 25 and 49, with many returning because the technology inside their jobs has changed.
Mining makes the shift especially visible. Dr. Nasse said the image many people still have of a miner bears little resemblance to new operations where electric machinery can be controlled remotely. Aviation is incorporating unmanned systems, and technical trades increasingly require workers who are comfortable around software.
“I think every job that we’re preparing and working with our students on, you know, it involves a lot of that digital fluency,” Dr. Nasse said.
That changes the role of a community college. Training cannot end once someone earns a credential because employers may be using different systems a few years later. Pima is bringing high school students into technical programs earlier while also seeing established companies pay employees to return for more training.
The Phone Call Advantage
Southern Arizona’s size may make that adjustment easier. Peterson pointed to the close relationship between local employers and educational institutions as something the region does particularly well. Companies can tell Pima what skills they are struggling to find, and the college already has industry advisory relationships built around those conversations.
Dr. Nasse sees industries overlapping more often as their technology changes. Aerospace needs technicians with stronger digital skills, and modern mining operations need workers who understand automation. The University of Arizona contributes engineering and research, giving employers another part of the workforce pipeline nearby.
Dukes thinks the region’s ability to connect those people quickly is harder to quantify than workforce numbers or available megawatts, but it affects how fast something can actually get done.
“The business leaders know each other. The community leaders, we literally all know each other,” he said. “We’re in that sweet spot of big enough to do it, but small enough that we can actually communicate and do it quickly.”
Southern Arizona already proved that it can support a large aerospace and defense industry. What comes next will ask more of the grid and require workers to retrain more often.
The region does not have unlimited time to prepare for either one. Its advantage might be that when a company says what it needs next, the people responsible for building it or teaching it are already close enough to pick up the phone.
