After mastering the engineering side of power utilities, Jacqueline A. Sargent acquired the management and business skills to operate in the corporate arena. Today she's director of generation support and resource planning for Black Hills Energy, Inc (Rapid City, SD).
There's a lot of responsibility involved. To start, Sargent supervises the engineering group that provides tech support to all Black Hills' generating facilities, regulated and non-regulated. She also oversees the energy marketing group for Black Hills Power, and the environmental compliance engineering staff.
In addition, she's responsible for supporting "due diligence" reviews for acquisitions and sales of other generating facilities. That means making sure everything is technically sound and generally copasetic in these contemplated transactions.
"I like to have variety in my career," Sargent remarks. "If I had to focus on one area I'd get bored. But this way there's always something new."
About Black Hills Corp
Black Hills Energy is the non-regulated wholesale business group of Black Hills Corp. Black Hills Power is a regulated electric utility that provides service to 60,000 customers in western South Dakota, northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana, and also sells energy in wholesale markets.
Black Hills Energy and Black Hills Power together have 1500 megawatts of generating capacity at facilities in seven states.
Day to day
Sargent supervises a generation support engineer, two environmental engineers, an energy resource analyst, an energy scheduler and an energy accountant. The energy resource analyst provides short-term load forecasts. A new team member, a real-time marketer, will monitor generation and demand and arrange to buy or sell power as needed since, as Sargent notes, "The forecast and the reality are never 100 percent on."
Sargent reports to Black Hills Energy president and COO Tom Ohlmacher. She's worked with Ohlmacher for a number of years and credits him with a "great deal" of her success. "It's okay to challenge him," she says. "I think that's helped me to keep an open mind and learn more."
Learning from the inside
She learned the business from the inside, starting as an intern in customer service for Black Hills Power. It was in the late 1980s, during her junior year in college.
She wasn't your typical intern. Her education had been interrupted by marriage after a year of ChE at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
She and her husband moved to Chicago; two kids and a divorce later she went back to school, this time in EE. "I didn't take any power classes because I never thought I would work for a utility," she says.
She finished the first semester with As and one B. "I guess the message for me was, 'You can do anything,'" she says. The internship became a full time job after she completed her BSEE with high honors in May 1989.
Her customer service job required her to answer questions of all kinds. She heard from consumers whose power was out, developers who needed power for new subdivisions, and commercial customers who wanted to conserve. "It really helped me understand all aspects of the business," she says.
Into engineering
Her original supervisor and mentor moved on, and "When she left, I felt I wanted to expand and use more of my engineering skills," Sargent says. The next year she became a combustion turbine instrumentation and control engineer with the ops group at Black Hills Power.
The projects were exacting and exciting. There was a retrofit at a coal plant; a conversion of diesel-fueled combustion systems to dual fuel with new controls; a brand-new coal-fired plant; and the conversion of two gas turbines to dual fuel. The gas turbines were particularly interesting, because she helped bring the project in with half the manpower projected by the manufacturer and $250,000 under budget.
In 1993 Sargent became project engineer and startup coordinator for Black Hills Power's Neil Simpson Station II. That project was completed six months ahead of schedule and $4 million under budget.
Supporting generation
After that stellar project, she took on a role as support engineer for special projects at all Black Hills Corp locations. "My boss used to kid me for being the 'do most' woman, because I'd do most anything," she remembers with a smile.
"I had all my papers for each station in a separate box. I used to say that the boxes were my office. Whichever direction I was going, I would throw that box in the car."
In 1998 she moved up to planning coordinator, using an electric utility modeling program to determine the optimum way to satisfy load and power contracts. "It was a great opportunity to move into something new," she says.
Very new. In 1999, her analysis showed that the company needed a new aeroderivative gas turbine to increase its generating capacity. She became PM for the purchase and installation of the new plant. It came on line near Gillette, WY in 2000, and she saw it through an expansion the next year.
In 2001 she became manager of generation technical services, then PM from ground-breaking to full commercial operation for a gas turbine peaking plant in Rapid City, SD. The plant came on line in 2002 and received the South Dakota Engineering Society's outstanding engineering achievement award.
"Getting that recognition was a good thing for me," she says. Along the way, she got her SD PE license in 2000 and MS in technology management from the South Dakota School of Mines in 2002. In 2003, she finalized power purchase agreements for the new 85- megawatt Wygen coal plant.
Directing
The promotion to director in April 2003 charged Sargent with providing more services to the plants that she considers the department's customers, as well as the generation tech support and energy marketing areas she's already aced.
Working at the utility has been rewarding, she reflects. The retrofitting projects, for example, gave her the chance to bring outdated technology up to state-of-the-art. "People who just work on the new technology miss the opportunity to see how it all evolved," she says.
"Our company recognizes your efforts," Sargent concludes. "I stepped up to the challenge and worked hard and had success. I was able to get things handed my way because people knew that I'd get them done."
Managing the family
Earlier in her career, when she was learning the business and traveling a lot, her kids went to live with their father and his new wife. But Sargent remarried in 1994 and the kids moved back with her the next year, when the older child entered high school.
Her daughter is now a senior in CE at the SD School of Mines, and her son is a sophomore in ME there. In the summer the family comes together to camp along the creek or play golf, and on winter vacations they snowmobile.
"My husband had not been married before, and suddenly he was the parent of teenagers. He helped me raise the kids through their teenage years," Sargent says with admiration.
Into societies
For fifteen hectic years, work and family left Sargent with little time for outside organizations. "Finally I have some time now and I'm starting to look at getting involved," she says.
She has joined her daughter at SWE luncheon meetings and discussions, and now she's spending time with the Black Hills chapter of the South Dakota Engineering Society. She's planning to take her part in the chapter's involvement in Engineers Week 2004.
Judging by her previous record, that new project will probably exceed expectations and come in under budget and ahead of schedule.
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