Opportunities

More Power to Power Engineers!

Do you want to be a power engineer?

On October 12th, the Electrical Minds Forum, the association of Electrical Engineering students of Govt. Model Engineering College, hosted a one hour talk on “Why Electrical Engineering?” with Mr. CM Varughese, Founder, IGA Tech Industries Ltd. and senior member of IEEE PES Kerala Chapter. He is also backed by over 17 years of experience at KELTRON, India’s first and the largest electronics corporation in the State sector manufacturing products in frontline segments.

The talk was focused exclusively on first year students. The reasons we had to organize this talk were obvious:

1. Quite a lot of electrical engineering graduates end up in unsatisfactory career roles outside their area of study.
2. In our fourth year, we had just realized the importance of power engineering and didn’t want our junior students to wait long enough to discover it for themselves.

Electrical engineering is a vast area of study. However, a lot of people mistake it for power engineering. Probably because that’s what they mostly see electrical engineers doing all the time. I had believed for a long long time that to be an electrical engineer meant only to be working with generators, motors, switchgear and all other equipment that looked huge and were expensive and practically, out of our reach for experimentation and exploring. Now, that’s the power engineering side of it.

Electrical engineering is composed of so many sub branches of study. You could opt to specialise in Power engineering, Control engineering, Electronic engineering, Microelectronics, Signal processing, Telecommunications and Instrumentation engineering or Computer engineering. There are just so many things you can experiment with and major in.

Power engineering is definitely one of the most exciting study/career options in electrical engineering. However, believing that power engineering is all there is to the electrical engineering branch would mean overlooking the enormous number of opportunities that lay in the parent field.

The keyword of the talk was disruption. Every major industry in the world is undergoing disruption today, thanks to powerful cutting-edge technologies like AI, ML, Blockchain and IoT.

What does it mean to be disrupted?

A disruption is a major disturbance, a wave that will change the status quo. Disruption is but temporary, and soon a steady state will arrive, but for this transition to happen, a new crop of engineers with specific skillsets become absolutely necessary. Power engineering is also undergoing massive disruption today. Integrating technologies like SCADA, WAMS, AI, ML, Blockchain to the grid would revolutionise power engineering like never before. This disruption is evident in three forms:

1. Intake of energy is transforming into an intake of electricity: Transportation and heating are increasingly depending on electricity, shifting from direct burning of coal and other conventional sources of energy. Not only is this due to the huge losses and low efficiency; the change can also be attributed to rising pollution levels and global warming.
2. The rise of the prosumer: The grid is evolving, growing, expanding, transforming: DERs and microgrids are bringing more prosumers into the game. Prosumer is a relatively new term for a consumer of electricity, who is also perfectly capable of producing and selling it. Consumer participation will make the market more decentralized and have positive effects on tariff from the consumer pov.
3. The digitization of the grid. Thanks to communication technologies, the grid can no longer be defined the way it used to be — unidirectional, non — interactive and boring. The smart grid and V2G are just a few years from realization here in India. The grid of the future will be actually able to communicate with the end user to bring about demand — side response.

If you’re thinking of power engineering the way it used to be, then probably there’s not much scope there for conventional engineering jobs in the future. But as it has always held true, there will always be work to be done.

And hence, new jobs demanding new skills will be created. Therefore, today, we are at a major juncture. Several conventional job roles and job profiles are about to undergo a major transition. Now, an electrical engineer must be able to code so as to enable digitisation in their respective sector. There will be more employment in control and monitoring, with very few personnel required on ground at the plant.

As it has always been, consumption of energy will be the major yardstick to measure a nation’s progress. How efficiently we achieve our energy goals in terms of renewable energy integration, digitisation and electrification of mobility in the least span of time will ultimately determine our position in the world as energy leaders.

So, if you want to be a power engineer, a degree in Electrical Engineering is the right place to begin. You’re on the right track. But make sure that your degree is complemented by a comprehensive understanding of latest technologies and an impressive skillset that makes you employable as a power engineer of the future.