Data Center Education Grant Awarded to Wenatchee Valley College

A sizable new grant has been bestowed upon Wenatchee Valley College by the National Science Foundation.

The grant is good for three years and amounts to just shy of $350,000. Funds will be marshaled for the betterment of the Environmental Systems and Refrigeration Technology (ESRT) program.

This boomtime for the data center economy will likely go on a while longer. According to Greg Jourdan, an ESRT instructor at the college, industry growth is projected at 10% per year.

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Between now and 2030, eye-watering sums - tens of billions of dollars - will be expended on data center construction. This, Jourdan says, is fueling an unprecedented demand for a "skilled, technically adaptable workforce capable of operating and maintaining these highly technical facilities.”

No such workforce exists right now. A WVC press release laments the stultifying reality of many data center operators; they've had "difficulty hiring experienced HVAC professionals, a problem compounded by the number of professionals expected to retire."

So how we do meet the moment? Well, Jourdan is spearheading a Critical Environments for Data Center Operations project. The project was designed with employers and candidates in mind.

Jourdan's strategy is threefold: "recruiting students from underrepresented and rural populations; developing K-12 educational pathways into CEDCO; and expanding and training current full- and part-time faculty in data center facilities and related topics."

But this isn't his doing alone. The grant proposal was cowritten by a colleague, Yuritzi Lozano, formerly the dean of professional technical services at WVC. Lozano now works for Pierce College, where she is VP of Learning and Student Success.