CONOVER — Utili-Serve plans to invest more than $24.8 million and add 105 jobs as it expands its Catawba County headquarters and builds a 25,000-square-foot manufacturing facility.
The expansion will add field-control and protective-relay-panel manufacturing at the Conover operation, establishing the headquarters as a regional hub for project management, manufacturing and logistics, according to the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
The new engineering and panel-assembly jobs will pay an average annual salary of $62,400, above Catawba County’s reported average of $56,937. At the announced average, the positions could add nearly $6.6 million in annual payroll to the region.
Utili-Serve was founded in Conover in 2008 and provides substation construction and maintenance, transformer and apparatus services, protective-relay-panel manufacturing, installation and commissioning, and general construction. The company operates 30 specialized construction crews across the Southeast.
A performance-based $250,000 One North Carolina Fund grant will support the project. The company must meet job-creation and capital-investment targets before receiving payments, and the award requires matching local participation.
WFAE independently reported the 105-job expansion, roughly $25 million investment, $62,400 average wage and state grant. The project’s business consequence is a larger North Carolina manufacturing and logistics base serving utility-scale grid projects along the East Coast.