The energy & utilities sector offers powerful opportunities

"Utilities used to be viewed as less 'sexy' than other industries, but this is changing with the interest in new technologies like wind farms and alternative energy." – Preeti Pachaury, Alliant Energy

"We need technical talent. If you have the goods, regardless of your background, doors will open like never before." – Frank Stewart, American Association of Blacks in Energy

By Dan Margherita
Contributing Editor

How are the opportunities for minorities and women in energy and utility companies? "In a few words, they're outstanding!" says Frank Stewart, president and chief operating officer of the American Association of Blacks in Energy (www.aabe.org, Washington, DC).

"For one thing, many utilities are getting worried as the baby boomers are retiring," Stewart notes. "They expect to have to do massive restructuring in the next five to ten years. We're talking about people at all levels, from linemen right on up."

In terms of technology, energy production is at a "sea-level change," Stewart says. "We've gotten used to energy sources like oil and coal that are available all the time, but the new green energy sources like wind and solar are not available 24/7. This means we have to manage the flow as well as the availability of power."

He's concerned that high schools and colleges, including the HBCUs, are not turning out enough of the kinds of techies that will be needed. "The heaviest demand is for EE and IT degrees," Stewart believes. "If this country can't graduate enough talent, we'll have to import it from elsewhere around the world."

And that brings him back to his original proposition: opportunities for minorities in energy and utility companies are off the ceiling.

"We need technical talent. If you have the goods, regardless of your background, doors will open like never before!"

Cynthia Lord manages generation engineering at Alliant Energy
At Alliant Energy (Madison, WI), Cynthia Lord admits to being "one of the more senior women around here." Lord is manager of generation engineering and works in a group of twenty-one people representing a sizable collection of specialized technical skills.

"We are a consulting engineering group that supports Alliant Energy's fifteen generating plants in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota," she explains. "We have people involved in specialized maintenance services and diagnostics, thermal performance engineers who monitor and measure plant performance and individual specialists representing chemistry, logistics and finance."

Lord earned her 1982 BSME at Iowa State University. "There were seventy-three of us in the ME graduating class but only three women," she recalls.

She joined Alliant Energy in 1999 after seventeen years at Consolidated Edison (New York, NY). "When I graduated from college there weren't a lot of offers, but companies were starting to pay attention to hiring minority candidates so I think that being a woman gave me a little advantage.

"Con Ed was very forward-thinking about expanding the diversity of its workforce," Lord reports. "I was close to the front in terms of opportunities, and at one point I reported to the woman who became the first woman plant manager in the company."

At Con Ed Lord worked in power plants, steam distribution, energy distribution and even accounting. Several of the managers had MBAs and this seemed an appropriate path to take; she completed her own MBA at Baruch College (New York, NY) in 1998.

In 1999 Con Ed was deregulating and Lord decided to see what else was out there. She sent out some resumes but did not hear back from Alliant Energy for a while. "I had quite forgotten about sending the resume," Lord says with a smile. "It turned out that a lot of what I had learned in New York was cutting edge and really useful to Alliant Energy."

Alliant Energy offered her a job as manager of a coal-fired base-load generating station, for which she moved back to Iowa. Then she headed into procurement and transportation of fossil fuels before taking on her current job as manager of generation engineering. She is registered as a professional engineer in the state of Wisconsin.

Alliant Energy is a "quiet" company
Alliant Energy is looking for people with engineering skills, particularly in EE, ChE and ME, says Preeti Pachaury, the utility's diversity manager. "However, as a business, we also look for candidates in fields like accounting, auditing, IT and environmental resources.

"We are a quiet company but working here is very rewarding," she says. "Diversity is a core value, and we are committed to it in our recruiting and retention practices.

"This is a great place to work and it's not surprising to find people who've been here twenty-five, thirty and even forty years," she reports. "Utilities used to be viewed as less 'sexy' than some other industries, but this is changing with the interest in new technologies like wind farms and alternative energy.

"We are actively recruiting women, attending job fairs and career advancement programs at colleges, high schools and even middle schools. If you wait till later it is difficult for people to change their career tracks," says Pachaury. "Being aware early of all the possibilities lets the young people make better choices."

Kernesa Samana: IT business systems analyst at AEP
Kernesa Samana is an IT business systems analyst at American Electric Power (AEP, Columbus, OH). AEP owns a 39,000 square mile network that supplies electricity to eleven states; Samana works in the IT planning group and her internal client is the company's tax group.

"The tax group has a five-year strategic plan," she explains. "We meet with them once a month to review their IT needs. We need to know all their systems, when upgrades are needed and so forth, and we also have to keep abreast of changes to rules and regulations. Each state we work in has its own set of tax laws."

Samana grew up in Washington Court House, a small town in Ohio. "My first exposure to IT was a computer programming class in high school," she says. But she learned fast and pursued her interest in college, earning a BS in systems analysis from Miami University (Oxford, OH) in 1997. In college she was involved with Inroads Columbus (www.inroads.org, St. Louis, MO), part of the nationwide Inroads group that places talented minority youth in internships in business and industry.

Samana interned at LCI International (later acquired by Qwest). "Much of my time was spent testing business logic and learning codes," she says. After graduation she went to work for Claremont Technology Group, working in every phase of the IT life cycle including database design and code development and implementation.

Later she joined Sterling Commerce (Dublin, OH), now an IBM company, where she worked in business-to-business integrations; she went on to Compuware (Detroit, MI), a software consulting organization.

She joined AEP in 2008 as the result of good networking. "I was president of the Columbus Urban League Young Professionals Association and we sponsored power lunches with key people in the community," Samana recalls. "We scheduled one with AEP and I met a former acquaintance who worked there. She asked me to submit a resume, and here I am.

"AEP lets me bring my background to a new environment," she adds with pleasure. "Our group is the bridge between the customer and the development team."

Samana is a member of the Women's International Network of Utilities Professionals (www.winup.org, Fergus Falls, MN) and AABE. She has seen many benefits to her minority status, she says. "I went to college on a minority scholarship; I would never have been able to do it otherwise. My association with Inroads was also a minority opportunity as was the Urban League.

"Being different is not to my detriment!" she declares. "It's a way to stand out. When you're the only woman in the room or the only African American in the room or both, people remember you!"

Kristin Day is a research engineer at NREL
Kristin Day has been at the Center for Transportation Technologies & Systems (CTTS), housed in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL, Golden, CO), for just over a year. "I moved here from Detroit, where I worked for General Motors for five years," she explains.

She was born and raised in Michigan and attended Michigan Technological University, completing a BSME in 2004.

At GM she was a lead calibration engineer in the hybrid powertrain division. "I decided I wanted to see the bigger picture in transportation, and NREL lets me do that."

It's NREL's mission and strategy to advance the energy goals of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the nation. Engineers and scientists in CTTS focus on many aspects of advanced transportation systems, including vehicle components, systems development and optimization, vehicle simulation, fuels research and development, fleet evaluations and emissions and air quality research.

Day works in the vehicle testing and analysis group, evaluating advanced vehicle technologies to determine their impact on areas like fuel economy, exhaust emissions, vehicle performance, component size, cost and market potential. She finds the work interesting and challenging.

"We deal with a lot of people at different labs," she says. "We work with manufacturers like GM and Ford as well as with universities. I review research papers and conduct computer-based vehicle simulations and analyses."

Day comes from a science-oriented family. In high school she was a member of Women in Science & Engineering (WISE, Stony Brook, NY), working on projects like building robots.

She's currently a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers and the DOE's Hydrogen Storage Engineering Center of Excellence, where, she explains, she looks into pathways for hydrogen storage system technology in a vehicle context.

Yit Ming Lee works in gas processing at Philadelphia Gas Works
Yit Ming Lee is a staff engineer in the gas processing department of Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW, Philadelphia, PA).

"I supervise maintenance work and help with capital projects that PGW is doing," he explains. "Last winter I was project manager on a temperature swing adsorption (TSA) project."

TSA is a way to purify gas mixtures by removing water and carbon dioxide. Lee was involved in scheduling and ordering parts, and wrote the RFP so the procurement department could solicit bids.

Lee, a native of Burma (now Myanmar), came to the U.S. with his family when he was four years old. He has a BSME from Temple University (Philadelphia, PA). "When I was in high school I wanted to be a mechanic because I liked working on cars, but this is much more interesting," he says happily. He's been at PGW for four years, and "Every day I learn something new."

He learns from the engineers in his group, as well as others in his field. He also belongs to a company-sponsored technical association which promotes discussion while building mentoring relationships for both new and experienced engineers.

Krystle King: performance engineering at FirstEnergy Corp
Krystle King is a performance engineer for FirstEnergy Generation Corp, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp (Akron, OH). She works at the Eastlake power plant outside Cleveland, which is part of FirstEnergy Solution Corp, an unregulated subsidiary. She is one of only a few woman engineers in the company.

King is a 2008 BSChE graduate of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She comes from a family of engineers; her father also works at FirstEnergy, on the utility side of the business.

King is a member of FirstEnergy's young professionals network, one of many diversity and inclusion programs at the company. She's also a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

She looks forward to exploring future opportunities at the company. "Based on my education, and the training I've had at FirstEnergy, I can see myself progressing into a supervisory or managerial role in the next five to ten years," she says.

Heather Lentz is a supervisor at Constellation Energy
"I've spent my whole working career here," says Heather Lentz, assistant general supervisor at Constellation Energy (Baltimore, MD), a leading supplier of energy products and services to wholesale and retail electric and natural gas customers. "I even interned here while I was in college, way back when the company was called Baltimore Gas & Electric."

Earlier this year a scrubber project at Constellation Energy's Brandon Shores Power Plant began commercial operation, significantly reducing sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions as well as reducing acid gases. Lentz has worked in her current job at Brandon Shores since 2008. Right now she's plant management liaison to air quality control systems. She works with a team of seventeen engineers and technicians, including an environmental technician.

"Our job is to clean up emissions and, in some cases, collect byproducts for use in other industries," she explains. One of the useful byproducts is gypsum, used in construction.

"When I interned, I worked on a different assignment each summer," Lentz recalls. "I realized that my true love is on the ground, in the plants. Now I'm working to integrate the scrubber into the plant process, including its business planning."

Lentz attended the College of Notre Dame of Maryland where she earned a BA in chemistry in 1996. Two years later she completed her BSChE at the University of Maryland. She also has a 2003 MBA from Loyola College (Baltimore, MD); "Early in my career I realized that an MBA would help me in supervisory and project management capacities," she says.

Her experience as a young woman at Constellation has been very positive. "Diversity is strongly supported here," she reports. "There is zero tolerance for harassment and in the plants everyone is very respectful.

"The company is committed to succession planning and developing the highest potential in all its employees," she adds. "The talent pool is constantly reviewed to monitor where people want to go and where the best fits are."

Dr Maria D. Salazar-Villalpando is a group leader at the NETL
Maria Salazar-Villalpando, PhD is a group leader in photoelectrocatalysis at the Morgantown, WV office of R&D of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). NETL, which also has locations in Pennsylvania, Alaska, Texas and Oregon, is part of the DOE's national laboratory system, supporting its mission to advance the national, economic and energy security of the U.S.

"I do research on how to reuse carbon dioxide to create usable products and fuels," she explains. These could include synthetic fuels, plastics or construction products like cement.

Salazar-Villalpando was one of the first people to bring up this area of research at NETL, and she's definitely passionate about it. She works in a specially designed experimental lab, and supervises a staff of five including chemists and technicians.

Salazar-Villalpando is a Fulbright scholar. She earned her PhD in ChE at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2000. Born in Mexico, she went to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México for her 1991 BSChE and her 1994 MS in environmental protection.

"I became interested in this field in high school," she recalls. "In Mexico, both boys and girls are more motivated toward engineering because it's presented as being both fun and interesting! Everybody truly believes that it's okay for girls to be interested in chemistry, and we also learned that we could make a lot of money."

Salazar-Villalpando has published articles about catalysis, electrochemistry, photocatalysis and fuel cells. She belongs to several professional organizations including the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the InterAmerican Photochemical Society, and the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.

Daniel Guzman is an apprentice system operator at PG&E
Daniel Guzman is currently an apprentice system operator in the electric operations department of Pacific Gas and Electric Co (PG&E, San Francisco, CA). "A system operator at PG&E monitors and maintains the electric system," Guzman explains. "This involves writing, checking, and directing switch logs used to safely clear a piece of equipment, or during an emergency when a piece of equipment needs to be forced out of service."

He applied to PG&E after reading about the company's Powerpathway program. "It's fairly simple, but with tremendous and exciting potential!"

PG&E's Powerpathway includes a group of programs aimed at producing the skilled workers needed by PG&E and other California energy and utility companies. It covers career preparation, industry, education and green initiatives.

Guzman was hired in 2008 after he completed the career prep program. "Now I'm in the fifth and last phase of my apprenticeship program and I hope to be a journeyman operator soon," Guzman says with enthusiasm.

He earned an associates degree in criminal justice from California State University at Fresno in 2007, and was working in the ER department of a local hospital when he decided "to try out for the PG&E team."

"I am currently training two new apprentices in my office," Guzman says. "I'm helping them with their voyage through the apprenticeship program. We train on work they encounter on a regular basis, with the intention of making them very successful and proficient as journeyman system operators."

D/C

Dan Margherita is a freelance business writer based in Philadelphia, PA.

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