Caroline Opiyo
A week in a development engineer’s role involves site visits, going out on site to plan out projects and visualise what it’s going to look like. Meeting with investment team leaders here in Warwick and with the investment team itself, people in finance, commercial and land & development.
Within the alliance itself I meet with the designers, planners and estimators, working out costs for projects and different options, writing up reports and presenting to the management about the different work we’re doing.
A project I’m working on at the moment is the Western HVDC link, this is a 400km long cable running between Scotland and England. About 360km of it is offshore which is very exciting for me - as an engineer coming into National Grid I never thought I’d work on offshore cable projects.
The project is mainly driven by the need to transfer all of the extra generation that’s coming into Scotland with the offshore and onshore wind. The demand for electricity is mainly in England so we needed to find a way to transfer this from Scotland to England.
If I didn’t do my job properly, It would have a negative impact on the delivery stage of the project. I’m right at the beginning of the project when we make the key decisions on how we’re going to actually deliver it. I’ll be looking at the various options and finding the most efficient, economic, cost effective option with the least impact on the environment and company reputation.
If I didn’t choose the best option and then found out much later in the project, we would have to come back to the design stage and redo everything which would cost us time and money. So I really have to get my decisions right and do my research to make sure I’ve covered every angle.