SYRACUSE — Power Engineers launched and is growing its Syracuse office with the aim of tapping into the technical talent base present in the region. Power opened its office in Syracuse last May. The firm employs 16 people in a 7,500-square-foot space at 1 Dupli Park Drive. The site has room to grow to more […]
SYRACUSE — Power Engineers launched and is growing its Syracuse office with the aim of tapping into the technical talent base present in the region.
Power opened its office in Syracuse last May. The firm employs 16 people in a 7,500-square-foot space at 1 Dupli Park Drive. The site has room to grow to more than 40, says Rod Coffey, who heads Power’s local office and is the northeast regional manager for substations.
Coffey says the office could double in size in 2013 and notes Power has no plans to cap the local site’s size.
“So long as Syracuse produces people, we’ll continue to bring them in,” he says. “We can’t find enough people in our industry.”
In Syracuse, Power works mainly on design of power delivery systems within the electrical grid. The office has other capabilities including civil, structural, mechanical, and environmental engineering, Coffey says.
The local market has plenty of good engineering schools Power hopes to tap, he adds. And there are experienced engineers in the region as well.
Power could also draw new employees from schools in the North Country as students from those colleges drift toward larger communities like Syracuse in search of more opportunities, Coffey says.
The need for work in the energy space is not likely to ebb anytime soon, he adds. Demands on the power grid will continue to grow and companies like Power will find plenty of work.
The firm had already been working for utilities with a presence in New York even before the Syracuse office opened. They include National Grid and Iberdrola.
Power Engineers also already had an office in Freeport on Long Island before launching in Syracuse.
Recruiting more people from the state should only help Power’s business in the market continue to expand, Coffey says. He adds that local employees could find themselves working on projects from around the country.
But the energy environment in New York is unique in some ways, Coffey adds. It’s the only state with its own independent system operator (ISO), the entity which controls the power grid, he explains.
Most other ISOs span multiple states. New England has its own, for example, and one of the operators in the Midwest also covers parts of Canada.
New York’s one-state-only ISO can make working on power projects here different, Coffey says.
“New York really is an island,” he says.
Power’s Syracuse office has already found itself working on a very public project that had nothing to do with energy. The company worked on rigging the line for Nik Wallenda’s high-wire walk across Niagara Falls last year.
The task wasn’t as simple as stringing a wire from one side to the other, Coffey says. Power added balancing sticks that hung below the line to prevent it from rotating as Wallenda crossed.
The firm also had to calculate the tension required to keep the wire from sagging under its own weight as it spanned the distance across the chasm.
In addition to Syracuse, Power Engineers could look to open additional new Northeast offices in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Coffey says. The employee-owned company has more than 30 offices in the U.S. and abroad and employs more than 1,700 people.
The firm is headquartered in Hailey, Idaho.
Contact Tampone at ktampone@cnybj.com
