How about getting a Masters in Engineering degree in two months?
As I was poised to celebrate with 30 Korean engineers and staff the ending of their one-month training program (see Press Release on KPX Training Session) it occurred to me that when I was a professor at Georgia Tech, we covered roughly 150 lecture hours to allow our students to get their Masters degrees. With our participants from Korea, we covered about 100 lecture hours. With an additional one month of exercises and discussions, our participants would qualify for a Masters of Engineering Degree. Indeed, instead of being taught by a few faculty members, who are all "academic," our guests received the full spectrum of expertise from academia as well as from consulting and power industry practitioners.
This is all related to the numbers. What mattered here was indeed the depth and balance of the program, a program that covered lectures on control center functions, market design, risk management, database standards, R&D issues, long-term planning, high-speed control and protection, hands-on training on emergency operation and market bidding – and the list goes on. One wonders, was this excessive and unnecessary? In our opinion: not at all. Here are the reasons.
In today’s market-based electricity environment, the educational requirements of engineers, traders, staff and managers should consider, at a minimum, the three fundamental broad issues: (a) the physical system, (b) the market and (c) uncertainty. If you talk about risk, you need all three. If you talk about Day-Ahead markets, you need all three. In short, these are the famous three legs of a 3-legged stool: It will not stand without all three legs.
Looking now at academic programs across the nation and internationally, we can applaud those programs that have recognized this situation. What has impressed me, indeed, is that in the Balkan region in southeast Europe, the universities there have adopted proactive programs along these lines with their graduates becoming well versed in engineering, market economics, risk analysis and good business know-how. We applaud such developments and hope that many institutions around the world, and, of course, in the USA, will follow suit.