Llewellyn King: As the electricity sector is reinvented, there's an urgent need for engineers and technicians to support them

At the new (founded 1997) but already highly prestigious Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

I have a soft spot for engineers and engineering. It started with my father. He called himself an engineer, even though he left school at 13 in a remote corner of Zimbabwe (then called Southern Rhodesia) and went to work in an auto repair shop.

By the time I remember his work clearly, in the 1950s, he was amazingly competent at everything he did, which was about everything that he could get to do. He could work a lathe, arc weld and acetylene weld, cut, rig, and screw.

My father used his imagination to solve problems, from finding a lost pump down a well to building a stand for a water tank that could supply several homes. He worked in steel: African termites wouldn’t allow wood to be used for external structures.

Electricity was a critical part of his sphere; installing and repairing electrical-power equipment was in his self-written brief.

Maybe that is why, for more than 50 years, I have found myself covering the electric-power industry. I have watched it struggle through the energy crisis and swing away from nuclear to coal, driven by popular feeling. I have watched natural gas, dismissed by the Carter administration as a “depleted resource,’’ roar back in the 1990s with new turbines, diminished regulation, and the vastly improved fracking technology.

Now, electricity is again a place of excitement. I have been to four important electricity conferences lately, and the word I hear everywhere about the challenges of the electricity future is “exciting.”

James Amato, vice president of Burns & McDonnell, a Kansas City, Mo.-based engineering, construction, and architecture firm that is heavily involved in all phases of the electric infrastructure, told me during an interview for the television program White House Chronicle that this is the most exciting time in supplying electricity since Thomas Edison set the whole thing in motion.

The industry, Amato explained, was in a state of complete reinvention. It must move off coal into renewables and prepare for a doubling or more of electricity demand by mid-century.

However, he also told me, “There is a major supply problem with engineers.” The colleges and universities aren’t producing enough of them, and not enough quality engineers — and he emphasized quality — are looking toward the ongoing electric revolution, which, to those involved in it, is so exhilarating and the place to be.

This problem is compounded by a wave of age retirements that is hitting the industry.

I believe that the electricity-supply system became a taken-for-granted undertaking and that talented engineers sought the glamor of the computer and defense industries.

Now, the big engineering companies are out to tell engineering school graduates that the big excitement is working on the world’s biggest machine: the U.S. electric supply system.

My late friend Ben Wattenberg, demographer, essayist, presidential speechwriter, television personality, and strategic thinker, hosted an important PBS documentary film and co-wrote a companion book, The First Measured Century: The Other Way of Looking at American History. He showed how our ability to measure changed public policy as we learned exactly about the distribution of people and who they were. Also, how we could measure things down to parts per billion in, say, water.

In my view, this is set to be the first engineered century, in tandem with being the first fully electric century. We are moving toward a new level of dependence on electricity and the myriad systems that support it. From the moment we wake, we are using electricity, and even as we sleep, electricity controls the temperature and time for us.

The new need to reduce carbon entering the atmosphere is to electrify almost everything else, primary transportation — from cars to commercial vehicles and eventually trains — but also heavy industrial uses, such as making steel and cement.

Amato said there is not only a shortage of college-educated engineers needed on the frontlines of the electric revolution but also a shortage of competent technicians or those trained in the crafts that support engineering. These are people who wield the tools, artisans across the board. In the electric utilities, there is also a need for line workers, a job that offers security, retirement, and esprit.

In the 1960s, the big engineering adventure was the space race. Today, it is the stuff that powers your coffeemaker in the morning, your cup of joe, or, you might say, your jolt of electrons.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Editor’s note: Readers should read about this Massachusetts-based company.

Gilda A. Barabino: Higher education must do more 'to bend the arc' by increasing diversity

A view of Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass. The dormitories are to the right; “The Oval ‘‘is straight ahead. Olin, whose president is the author of the essay below, is a very unusual undergraduate-only engineering school. Though it’s new — it was founded in 1997 — it’s already prestigious and has developed partnerships with such noted nearby institutions as Babson College, Wellesley College and Brandeis University.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

America is undergoing a reckoning as the suffering and setbacks caused by years of systemic racism is coming into full view. This heightened awareness around racism, sparked by death and injustice, must result in the development of real pathways to eliminate systemic racism, or it will be a lost opportunity for our generation to do our part in—to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—bending the long “arc of the moral universe’’ toward justice. Higher education, like all other institutions in our society, must do its share of bending the arc.

My academic path, and that of other Black people and people of color, is riddled with instances of both egregious and subtle forms of racism. When this happens to Black people in our academies, it threatens the well being of all of us by limiting access to the creation of knowledge and innovation that flourishes when a diversity of minds is present. Drawing from my own experience as a scientist, professor and administrator, I believe there are a number of ways in which colleges and universities can advance and improve the lives of all our students—and especially students of color.

First, we must do more to increase diversity in our student body. This not only creates more opportunity for our students from underrepresented communities, but also increases the variation of perspective and lived experience that we know produces a richer learning and social experience for all students. We can achieve this by stepping up our recruiting efforts that target high schools serving Black, Latinx and Native American populations. To further support building diversity, we can look at new approaches to sustaining our financial aid practices in light of the economic pressures of the pandemic, restructuring current programs to yield more aid and pushing our alumni and corporate partners to increase scholarship and grant opportunities. Supporting organizations like the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, for example, broadens opportunities.

Creative and strategic team-building is another way to ensure success and positive experiences among our diverse students. At Olin College of Engineering, where I am president, part of how we transformed engineering instruction was by developing student-centered programs that rely on teams working on projects. While these teams are created to be self-sufficient in sharing and experiencing learning, our instructors intervene to ensure that inherent biases do not unknowingly arise in things like the assigning of tasks or how information is shared with professors.

As we work on the diversity in our student population, it is equally important that we make every effort to increase diversity in our faculty and staff as well. Black faculty account for a mere 6 percent of all full-time faculty in the academy. I know from personal experience that no matter how excellent a department’s faculty and support staff may be, it is hard for students of color to imagine a future in which they can succeed without the distinct modeling and mentorship made possible from professors and counselors who look like them and who have had many of the same life experiences. (As a new faculty member at Northeastern University in 1989, lacking mentors and role models of my own, but recognizing their importance, I served as a role model and mentor in the NEBHE Role Model Network for Underrepresented Students and as a consultant to NEBHE’s equity and diversity programs.)

One of our most important roles in the education and lives of our students is preparing them for, and connecting them to, the world at large and their path to success. Very often, students of color do not have the connections that lead to opportunities like internships and summer jobs in their field of interest.  We can build bridges to successful careers by ensuring that our career centers are operating at the highest level possible and are able to establish connections with companies that are eager to help diverse students.

This process can be helped by making every effort to connect diverse students with the career center and promoting its value to them. As colleges and universities operating in New England, we are fortunate to be in a vibrant regional economy made up of established companies, innovative startups and leading health-care and research institutions. By developing stronger partnerships between our schools, regional businesses (many of which provide internships and other work opportunities) and the business community leadership, we can leverage these connections into career-focused opportunities on behalf of all of our students, which would be especially helpful in creating life-changing opportunities for our diverse students.

Even though higher-education institutions are facing significant operational and financial challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, we nonetheless must take action today to ensure that we are moving beyond words and demonstrations and taking real action to ensure that equity, diversity and opportunity exists and benefits young people of color—not only within our quads, residence halls and classrooms—but in the larger world as well.

Gilda A. Barabino is president of Olin College of Engineering and professor of biomedical and chemical engineering there.