Currents

COMPILED BY VICTORIA SCHARF DeCASTRO

Seeking a high-energy career?

Lanier Technical College’s Oakwood campus offers a new program designed for launching a career in the electric utility industry.

Jackson EMC’s Doug Smith, far right, a district engineering supervisor at the Jefferson-based co-op, teaches Electrical Utility Technology at Lanier Tech. Here, Smith and hisstudents visit a power facility. (Photo courtesy Jackson EMC.)

The associate degree (or diploma) program in electrical utility technology trains students to work as technicians at electrical utilities. Graduates qualify for employment as engineering technicians, engineering representatives, substation maintenance technicians or electricians, meter technicians or generator technicians.

The program comes at a critical time when the electrical utility industry is eagerly seeking a new crop of achievers to fill important positions. “We need to get the best and brightest, because half of the work force is getting ready to retire,” says Neil Matheson Jr., lead instructor for electrical utility technology and electronics technology at Lanier Technical College’s Oakwood campus. “We need to get some new blood in here.”

Two Jackson EMC employees teach classes in the program. Doug Smith teaches courses in substation and distribution, and Ken Brand teaches Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA). Students also take field trips to Jackson EMC in Jefferson to see their classwork in action.

The program—just two years old (it graduates its first students this academic year)—provides a solid steppingstone to a rewarding career. “The power industry has a retention rate of about 97 percent,” Matheson says. “Once people get hired, they stay.”

—Deborah Geering

GEORGIA Magazine awards laptop to student

Last January, Greg Crowder, left, vice president of marketing and administration at Sumter Electric Membership Corp. (EMC) in Americus, presented Jimbo Horne, a student at Schley County High School in Ellaville, with a new laptop computer. The award took place at Sumter EMC headquarters in Americus. Horne was the winner of GEORGIA Magazine’s 2008 statewide laptop contest.

GEORGIA Magazinecreated the annual contest to encourage students to fill out and send in the reader inquiry coupon included in the magazine’s September Higher Education Guide section. The coupon enables students to request information on specific schools and allows them to enter the laptop giveaway. Find this year’s coupon on page 45.

Leadership Georgia highlights EMC international programs

Linemen from Coweta-Fayette EMC and other Georgia cooperatives worked alongside Coopeguanacaste lineman to bring electricity to remote areas of Costa Rica. (Photo courtesy Coweta-Fayette EMC.)

Georgia’s electric membership corporations (EMCs) recently played a prominent role in a leadership program for 250 Georgia leaders, showcasing EMC ties to a sister cooperative in Central America.

Lending his expertise to the program, which focused on education, energy and environmental initiatives, Tucker-based Oglethorpe Power Corp.  President/CEO Tom Smith discussed energy challenges and opportunities facing Georgia and the efforts of electric utilities to meet growing energy demand.

Georgia EMC Vice President Bill Verner also contributed significantly to Leadership Georgia’s (LGA) first international program held in June in Costa Rica. “It was a rare opportunity to showcase electric cooperatives in a part of the world where many areas remain today like rural America was before electricity,” says Verner.

According to Verner, a program chair, the locale served as a timely reminder that developed and developing countries are still desperate for electrification in rural areas to foster improved agricultural practices and a better quality of life.

H.G. “Pat” Pattillo, a Leadership Georgia founding father (and a pioneer of eco-tourism in the Guanacaste region) who has developed the Hacienda Pinilla residential community, the site of the June program, was overwhelmed that such a large LGA contingent traveled to Costa Rica to learn about innovative approaches to common challenges. 

Attendees heard a moving story when Pattillo spoke of his family farm in Rockdale County getting electricity for the first time from Covington-based Snapping Shoals EMC when he was a young boy. LGA attendees then learned that almost 70 years later (2007) through NRECA’s International Programs Division, another Georgia EMC helped bring electricity to one of the 40 Costa Rican schools that Pattillo’s foundation sponsors in Guanacaste.

That cooperative is Coweta-Fayette EMC (CFEMC), and CFEMC President/CEO Tony Sinclair spoke of CFEMC’s close connection to Costa Rican cooperative Coopeguanacaste, which serves electricity to the Guanacaste region and in particular to Hacienda Pinilla. Through this association, CFEMC has shared technical expertise with Coopeguanacaste, and personnel have worked alongside their linemen to help construct power lines without the benefit of modern conveniences like bucket trucks.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s International Programs Division coordinates these programs and the utilization of donated or retired materials and equipment worldwide. Here in Georgia, electric cooperatives and vendors host an annual charitable fund-raiser in April, Take Aim At Progress (www.takeaimatprogress.com), which offsets travel and lodging expenses for the linemen who volunteer.  In recent years, linemen from Flint, Grady, GreyStone, Habersham, Irwin, Jackson and Walton EMCs have worked in other areas of Costa Rica and Guatemala.

In addition to showcasing the success of the international program, the LGA program included segments on Costa Rican initiatives of both the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and sustainable living practices being developed on EARTH University’s satellite campus in the region.

Participants included dignitaries from Gov. Sonny Perdue’s staff, Georgia Dept. of Economic Development, state legislators and judges, the Board of Regents and congressional staff, among many other community and business leaders.

Leadership Georgia is one of the nation’s oldest and most successful leadership programs for business, civic and community leaders.