Meet Autumn Engh, an engineer keeping watch over BPA's electric highway

Name: Autumn Engh
Job title and work location: Electrical Engineer, Transmission Line Engineering, Electrical Effect
Born/Raised/Hometown: Venita, Oregon

How would you explain your job to your neighbor, so they not only understand what you do but what BPA does and its role in our region?

BPA oversees the electricity highway in the Pacific Northwest and brings power from the remote places where it’s made to the places where it’s used. There are a LOT of places that need power. So imagine that on this highway, BPA is driving a giant semi-truck instead of a regular car. Just like you need a special license to drive a larger vehicle, you need specialized people to control the higher voltages that move between the intersections in our transmission system. Since electricity is a bit of a diva and doesn’t always follow what the theory says it should, my job is to look at our highway – and anything close to our electricity highway – and make sure safety buffers are in place. 

What made you decide to become an engineer?

It was a bit of a fluke. I went to high school in a really rural little town in Oregon, and a friend needed a ride to Salem to take the ASVAB (Editor’s note: the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, is an exam used to guide enlisted military job placement). He bribed me with gas money and hot chocolate, so I agreed to take him and found out when we got there that the ASVAB is over 4 hours long. Since I was stuck there until he finished anyway, I decided to take the test as well and was really surprised by how well I did in the engineering and logic problems. Engineering had always seemed like some vague thing I didn’t really know enough to even contemplate, but this test said I should be good at it. Fast forward a few years and I was hooked on all the possibilities. It was like the best puzzle ever, but this one never ended.

What would you say to young people interested in pursuing a degree in engineering?

College limits engineering to categories, but that does engineering a real disservice. Almost no career out there is just one flavor. There are so many different nuances that whatever your particular geek is, you can find a place in it, and your path to it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, so try not to judge yourself.

How does your work support BPA’s mission and strategy?

BPA’s mission and strategy is to maintain an electric highway system that safely transports power, from several different energy sources – hydro, nuclear, wind, etc. – while simultaneously keeping rates low and minimizing impacts to the environment and ecosystems. My job is to clear out as many speedbumps as possible on that electric highway between rest stops. That means being an electrical-effects phone-a-friend for not just BPA field personnel who have electrical concerns, but also customers who live around our lines or the utilities that operate around us. It’s like playing Tetris, or with Legos. I figure out how we can match the different needs of our system and our communities’ needs in the same area while safely providing power.

The coolest or most surprising thing about my job is:

The high-voltage direct current line. I hadn’t ever heard of high-voltage DC power transmission before coming to work at BPA. In school we learn about manipulating alternating current power, so it was really interesting to have a DC high-power application for comparison. Understanding how everything I’d learned about how AC behaves needed to be tweaked for DC – and then figuring out how to tweak it – is fascinating.

I like working at BPA because:

BPA is the most collaborative environment I’ve ever worked in. My work group is filled with different age groups, experience levels and expertise. If the 20-something is the subject matter expert and we need their expertise to solve a particular problem, they take the lead and everyone else supports. If tomorrow, the expertise area is held by a 50+ person who has been in this job for decades, then they lead and everyone else supports. If the problem is on a project helmed by someone fresh out of college who got hired 3 months ago, they lead with the knowledge that they can ask questions and everyone else will support their growth. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of ego or competition, and that’s a rarity I’m lucky to have found and would like to hold onto.

Safety is a core value at BPA. How do you incorporate safe behavior into your practices and environment?

If I see something that I don’t understand, I ask for clarification until I know it’s safe. Part of my job revolves around ensuring the environment is kept safe from electrical effects. If I don’t feel sure, then it is upon me to stop work until the safety problem has been fixed. If I’m being overruled on a safety concern that I have, I bring it up within my group and possibly with my supervisor. We all work together to maintain an environment where any concern by any member is given weight and deliberation before we come to a consensus.

What inspires you?

I am inspired by the open field of possibilities for the future of the electrical grid. Seeing all the new applications for existing technologies and technological innovations being developed to adjust something that has existed for almost 100 years to make it last 100 more is amazing and humbling to be a part of.

Tell us a little about your military service.

I was in the U.S. Navy just shy of 7 years as a nuclear machinist’s mate. I enlisted a few years before 9/11 when my community did not view serving in the military as a positive thing for anyone, and I was widely discouraged from my path. Which is funny because growing up poor in rural Oregon after the fall of the logging industry, there weren’t a lot of options for work that earned enough to support yourself. College tuition was well out of my reach, and with four younger siblings coming after me, there just wasn’t money for other opportunities. The military offered college credits, food, a place to live, medical care and a steady paycheck. It put me in a position to help my siblings have more options when it came time for them to go out in the world. We weren’t at war with anyone then. Desert Storm was just ending and troop strength was drawing down, and it seemed like a good deal, so I had my parents sign to let me join after high school but before I’d turned 18. By the time I was 23, we’d been in four conflicts and I saw a big swing in public sentiment. Before 9/11, when I would go home on leave and wear my uniform, some people called me a “baby killer;” a couple of years after 9/11, I began hearing “thank you for your service.” It was a bit of a mental whirlwind, but that whirlwind had spit me out with very real ideas of what service to my country meant to me. I started without any real patriotism to speak of, but my time in the military really distilled my stance on what patriotism was, what it should be and how it would exist in my life moving forward.