Are we engineering an energy crisis? Hargreaves speaks at forum.
During Engineering Week, Engineers Australia’s national past president (2010), Doug Hargreaves, took part in a public forum at the Queensland University of Technology entitled “Are we engineering an energy crisis?”.
The forum discussed Australia’s capacity to manage our current and future demands for energy. Key to the discussion was the high dropout rate amongst engineering students and graduates once they hit the workforce.
A story on the forum in The Weekend Australian (September 24-25) quoted Doug Hargreaves as saying: ‘If we’re not very careful, there will be an energy crisis.
‘[The universities are] going out into the schools and talking to principals, talking to career advisors, talking to the science and math teachers [and] talking to the students to recruit them into engineering.
‘But we lose probably a quarter to a third of them in the first year. So why do we spend so much time recruiting them, if we don’t spend as much, or more, time keeping them?’
The article went on to say Hargreaves believes growing energy needs means Australia needs to start moving ‘very quickly towards the renewables’. But he is reported as saying
‘We can’t do that easily right now because we don’t have sufficient technology available. And if we don’t have the technology that means we don’t have the skills.’
The question is: how does Australia recruit, train and retain engineers ‘to develop and use new technologies to foster the growth of renewable energy’?
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