"It's grown by a whole bunch since those days," Christofferson said. "We now have 70 apprentices representing the small municipalities through Utah, a little bit into Arizona, a little bit into Nevada, a little bit into Wyoming."

He said UVSC's program teaches everything from basic pole climbing and electrical theory to transformer theory and dealing with substations. "We deal with all of those apprentices to train them for substation maintenance, building power lines, maintaining power lines and the metering side of things."

Such programs are being aggressively promoted and created by utilities and colleges nationwide.

Austin Community College in Texas started a power technology degree program in May with seven students and now has about 35. Youngstown State University's two-year electrical lineworker program has grown from 11 students in 2002 to 43, and its power plant program has grown from 14 students in 2003 to 73.

"We have been getting calls from other schools and companies wanting to set up something similar," said Hector Aguilar, chairman of the electronics and advanced technologies department at Austin Community.

The retirement of veteran workers is a particular problem in the power industry. Utilities hired fewer people over the past 10 to 20 years as companies trimmed costs to achieve profitability amid deregulation.

Eskelsen said Rocky Mountain Power has been trying to keep its work force "fairly trim."

"You want to be prudent, and you want to make sure you have adequate staffing, but it's part of our commitment to run a very tight operation, because we recognize that any of our costs of providing our product may get into rates, eventually," Eskelsen said.

Electricity demand also is rising, meaning more power plants are needed and more workers to run them.

"We went through a period of time when some of the companies didn't do as much training with apprentices as they should have as far as keeping their numbers going, and ... they're worried if they don't get some people trained fast, we're going to have a real shortage problem," Christofferson said.

"The growth of especially the Western area, with the amount of people moving in, means some of our cities have gone from a crew of maybe two or three guys back in the '70s to probably 15 linemen now."

Duke Energy Corp., which worked with the University of Cincinnati to develop power plant training, knows that electricity supply is going to become tighter and more plants will have to be built, said Steve Brash, a spokesman for the utility based in Charlotte, N.C.

"We want to promote educational programs that can provide a work force able to operate these new facilities as they come online," he said.