Career Options for a Power PE

[seandapaul24]

I have experience working at a large utility and am interested in starting an engineering consulting firm within the next 3-5 years.

Here's the dilemma: since my experience is in the utilities sector ideally that would my target market however I've noticed that utilities tend to contract or sub work to larger firms making it difficult as a small firm to get a foot in the door.

Is it typically harder for small engineering firms that are trying to get consulting work with utilities?

Are there areas within utility engineering work worth pursuing as a small guy?

 

[Wildsoldier PE]

Usually consulting engineers design lighting, receptacle locations, power requirements, power distribution for new buildings, building expansions and remodels... that is something you can go as consulting engineer if you want

(null)

 

[vdubEE]

I work at a utility as well and we mainly contract the large firms as well. Depending on the work, it is possible for some of the smaller local firms to get the work but normally it is folks like Burns and Mac, ECI, etc.

However, I have a friend who still works as a Consulting Engineer and they do get design work with municipalities that own their own transmission/distribution systems. The projects I know he has worked on are designs for new transmission lines, substations, distribution lines, and relay and protection. Not sure how all utilities work but it might be possible to use some of your connections in your existing job to get work after you start your own firm. I do not think they have a real hard time finding and getting contracts for the work either. Once you get a connection and produce a quality product, the work will probably come more frequent.

 

[illini1022]

It also might be possible for a smaller consulting company to subcontract with one of the larger firms that are awarded a large volume of utilities projects.

 

[PowerEngineer]

I work for a small (<15 employees) consulting firm. The majority of our work comes from REMCs, municipalities, and industrial facilities... primarily REMCs. It seems that for large projects (substation design, system planning, etc), they often contract consulting firms. You'll primarily be working with distribution systems; we only occasionally work with sub-transmission, and I don't recall my company ever doing design/planning for transmission.

You'll probably need to expand your scope to include industrial/commercial facilities. We get a fair amount of work from them in studies (coordination, arc flash, etc) and power quality investigation. It's been my experience that industrial facilities are a bit less "loyal" to consulting firms... you'll get your foot in the door with an industrial facility quicker than you will with a utility.

 

[chaosiscash]

Look into federal projects/large facilities. Larger sites have their own utilities groups that sub out work. Lots have small business set-asides, meaning a certain percentage of contracts have to go to small businesses under x size (usually based on annual revenue). There are also set-asides for certain business types (woman-owned, minority-owned, veteran-owned, etc), if you can qualify for any of those.

Good luck.