Last year, watching the evolving energy marketplace in the U.S. and Mexico and the huge inroads solar PV and wind are capable of making, it was both exhilarating and a bit distressing. Exhilarating due to the huge strides being made in lowering costs of renewable energy. Distressing (selfishly) in that my being a mechanical/process engineer, there is not a ton of technical scope in those particular types of projects for my specific skill set; doesn’t take a guy like me to set up a PV panel and plug in, if that is the way the industry is headed. So it forces us to review what skills should be essential for a wide variety of energy generation technologies, or even on the demand side.
Perhaps some of you have similar concerns – are the talents you are acquiring now going to be needed in the energy landscapes of tomorrow?
As one fragmentary example of how desperately the wide range of your talents are needed now, and likely for all the years of your upcoming career, you’d have to first read this linked post about horror and the author H.P. Lovecraft.
If some fragment of sanity remains after reading that, we can discuss further.
The first takeaway from going through that exercise, in pulling apart CAPEX, OPEX and revenue/cost differences in many countries, is that there are so many improvements still to be done, on all continents. The magnitude of challenges the Earth faces are so widespread and diverse that if you take on tasks such as these, there are decades of work just in the renewable energy field to improve matters.
The second takeaway should be especially reassuring to the non-engineers that must suffer through my classes. So many of the obstacles we face, as addressed in the AFREA report, require broader skills sets to untangle: compassionate yet efficient ways to address social roadblocks for projects, creative financial/risk mitigation strategies and improving the political culture.
If you want a high level feel for how much value for countries such as these remains to be unlocked, consider that with today’s power generation technologies, something well within 100-120 $/MWh should be achievable, with obstacles cleared. So take the AFREA figure, flip it 90, and integrate to do the math on every country’s consumption and the amount by which current costs exceed values such as that. Large number. Then bring the revenue/costs into alignment which will reduce the risk profiles of the utilities and allow cheaper financing. Then bring electricity and its broader benefits to the rest of each nation’s inhabitants that currently do not have it. Kenya is a case study that is making great strides using their particular talents and resources, but even there we can see much work remains to be done.
Big effort right? It’s horrifying that there is such a gap between what exists and what should be achievable, but that’s your gap to fill with your talents. And very timely to apply your effort in doing God’s work, because the tools/technologies that make this possible are now accessible and quite economical. 
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