Casteel Corporation

With an unwavering dedication to clients and an innovative management approach, Casteel Corporation has become a leading national electrical contractor. “We are not grounded by geography,” says Todd Casteel, president of Casteel Corporation. “We’ve worked everywhere from California to New England.” Located in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Casteel Corporation is highly experienced in the industrial, utility, commercial and institutional, shale gas, petrochemical, heavy highway, substation and transmission lines and renewable energy sectors.

The company’s ability and willingness to travel for clients has created an edge on the competition in regards to Northeast electrical contractors. A fair amount of Casteel Corporation’s revenue stems from the renewable energy and power generation industries, which are not restricted to a certain geographical location. A forerunner in the construction of wind turbines, solar arrays, biomass generation facilities, hydroelectric, battery storage sources and coal-fired generating plants throughout the United States, Casteel Corporation’s experience delivers the engineering, procurement and construction expertise to help customers get more power on the grid within critical scheduling and budget constraints.

Complex work with safety the top priority

Utility and substation projects complement Casteel Corporation’s renewable energy projects. The Casteel Corporation team possesses extensive experience helping clients construct, maintain and upgrade facilities, implement and upgrade complex control and emission systems and maximize performance.

In addition to quality and service, Casteel Corporation’s success is due in large part to the company’s commitment to safety. Understanding how vital safety is to its workforce and clients and coupling safety policies with effective application, the company rates at the top of the industry. “Safety is by far the biggest indicator of our success and what drives our business,” says Casteel. “We work to protect our workforce at all costs and understand how vital it is to our clientele. At Casteel Corporation, we believe safety is a differentiator in our value proposition.”

In 2015, Casteel Corporation’s impeccable safety record earned recognition in the form of NECA’s Zero-Injury Award, which recognizes member-companies that have worked a full calendar year without any recordable incidents.

Casteel says that his company prefers the industrial, grid technologies, power generation and renewable energy projects over commercial work due to the challenges and complexities of each job. “We’re very client based,” he adds. “We want the hardest project in the market. The renewable technology market has been very good for us because we’re working with new and innovative technology.”

Renewable energy projects that Casteel Corporation has been involved in have included wind farms in the $20 million range. The company was also involved in a component of a $1 billion solar project in Southern California called Mt. Signal. “We did a 230 kilovolt EPC pole line as well as the 35 kilovolt aerial pole line collection for that project, which involved a considerable amount of line construction work,” recounts Casteel. Other projects have included a fully automated steel mill for Allegheny Ludlum, a steel piercing mill for Vallourec Steel, a new coke battery for Arcelor Mittal Steel and a wind farm for Amazon in Indiana.

Applying CW/CEs to the industry

When it comes to working with construction wiremen/construction electricians (CW/CEs), Casteel feels it is a productive program for the industry. However, Casteel Corporation is unable to utilize the program in a beneficial manner. “We might chase more work if we had that opportunity,” says Casteel. “Currently we find the new labor classification to be challenging as the sophistication of the types of work we traditionally target require a higher skill level than the CW/CE provides. However, I believe that the innovative thinking of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)/National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) collaboration utilizing the new classification will usher in a new era of market that the union contractor hasn’t explored in the past.

In the event of managing CW/CEs, Casteel remains open to the idea of incorporating the program. “It does take more overhead to manage the CW/CEs,” he says. “We need to have a relationship with the IBEW with an open mindset. The previous leadership we had was totally against it so we knew it would never work here because they were limiting the market segments to such a narrow work market that it wasn’t worth chasing. I think it needs to be expanded into large commercial processes.”

As a member of NECA, Casteel finds numerous benefits of attending the annual NECA convention. “The exposure to new products lines is extremely valuable,” he says. “The seminars are informative and they give you some great market exposure as well as providing a solid foundation of things you need to look further into as a company. Ultimately, attending the NECA shows stimulates thoughts and ideas of how you work more efficiently.”

As a relatively young company, Casteel Corporation has already solidified itself as a staple in the specialty electrical contracting world, especially in the power generation, grid technology, and renewable energy markets. As technology and industrial energy technologies continue to advance, Casteel Corporation will remain an example of how to perform complex electrical work while maintaining safety as a top priority.