Westrafo Amercia LLC breaks ground for hundreds of new jobs in Trotwood, Ohio

TROTWOOD — With the collective slap of a line of spades, leaders from Ohio and Trotwood celebrated the $15 million investment of an Italian manufacturer of electric transformers into a fast-growing business park off Wolf Creek Pike on Monday.

Westfrafo America LLC will create 230 jobs in a planned 216,000-square-foot plant at the 85-acre GATED Global Park, next door to smart tag producer Technicote, which itself is near EPIX Tube Co. and other businesses.

Soon, the park will be home to a total of some 500 jobs, said Chad Downing, executive director of the Trotwood Community Improvement Corp.

“This journey for Trotwood didn’t just start today,” said Yvette Page, mayor of Trotwood.

Credit: Jim Noelker

Credit: Jim Noelker

Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted recalled visiting Trotwood shortly after the Memorial Day tornadoes that devastated that community and others across the Dayton area in 2019. Husted said he predicted then that he would return with good news one day.

Monday was that day.

“Welcome to Trotwood and Ohio,” Husted told Alberto Cracco, chief executive of Westrafo. “We value your investment.”

Westrafo America LLC is a maker of power and distribution transformers, and it has chosen Trotwood to open its first plant in North America.

Westrafo expects to create 230 full-time positions, generating more than $12 million in new annual payroll, according to the state.

The Trotwood site will produce the company’s medium and high-voltage transformers and energy systems, which are focused on renewable energy growth. The company has been exporting products to the United States since 2019.

Credit: Jim Noelker

Ferguson Construction has been positioned on the Wolf Creek Pike construction site for some time, on behalf of GATED, the business park’s developer.

The planned building will include 216,000 square feet of space for industrial manufacturing and 15,000 square feet of office space.

Westrafo launched within the transformer energy industry in 2014, Cracco told this newspaper recently. The company today has manufacturing facilities in Italy and Ghana. Cracco visited the U.S. last year in search of a home for the American-based facility, touring multiple states across the Midwest.

The search for the right location took a year. J.P. Nauseef, president and CEO of JobsOhio, the Ohio government’s private development arm, told listeners at a groundbreaking ceremony that Ohio had been competing with some 20 other possible locations for this plant.

Nauseef and Husted hailed recent investments by Honda, Intel and others in Ohio.

“We’ve seen an energy across the whole state of Ohio,” Nauseef said. “But as a longtime resident, I can confirm that the soil in Trotwood is rich and it is deep.”

Credit: Jim Noelker

“We selected Ohio, and Dayton in particular, as the best area for us based on the type of skilled workers, and a type of location that is similar to our origin,” Cracco told the Dayton Daily News last month, pointing to similarities in population and size of the Dayton area to the company’s other locations in Italy and Ghana.

“We are here today because we want to grow more in the United States,” Cracco said Monday. “The United States is suffering a lot because of a shortage of transformers.”

In the U.S., the number of distribution transformers may need to increase between 160% and 260% compared to 2021, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated in a February 2024 report.

Utilities are experiencing extended lead times for transformers of up to two years, up fourfold compared to pre-2022 lead times, and reporting price increases by as much as four to nine times in the past three years, the laboratory said in the same report.