Owen Scott
Design Engineer at Vattenfall
How I got here
I did a degree in aerospace engineering at university. My first job after graduating was as a research engineer for an aerospace company, which was very much like working on a dissertation project you're given a big piece of work, you spend six to nine months working on it mostly by yourself, then you write a report and present it.
That role taught me a lot technically, but it wasn't for me. I realised I wanted something more collaborative, where you're working with different teams and seeing projects move forward quickly rather than spending months deep in one thing.
I saw the role at Vattenfall and it was exactly what I was looking for. Heat networks are part of the renewable energy transition, which interested me, and the role involved working across different parts of the business rather than being stuck in one narrow technical area.
What I actually do day-to-day
I'd say there's a mixture of a few meetings a day maybe two hours worth. Then maybe an hour of chasing information. As engineers we deal with quite a lot of information, and finding it sometimes isn't always straightforward. I'll be contacting the operational team, the commercial team, sometimes business development, getting information off them so I can do design work or modelling.
The rest of the time is spent doing the actual work. That's either design, modelling, or reviewing documents. It could be reviewing proposals from consultancies, or writing scopes of work for consultancies to do detailed design for us.
The modelling we do is all on spreadsheets and Excel. We have our core solution model, which is the main model the engineering team uses. You add in all the inputs so if we've got Edinburgh College, they've got this much floor area, we expect them to use this much heat load throughout the year. We'll have that for all the different customers, maybe some different housing developments as well. Then we have set assumptions built into the model. Every new build house uses 30 watts per square metre, for example.
It's just a case of going through the model, checking everything's right, and then passing on the outputs to the respective people. In theory, once you've got all the inputs it should be fairly automated, but it's never as simple as you think. A lot of the time is spent finding mistakes a cell not referenced right, assumptions not set up correctly.
The design work is quite often CAD. It's early-stage design. Once we get so far, we subcontract our work out because we're not design specialists. It's just 2D design in AutoCAD. Usually mapping out on a map overlay where pipes are going to go, and annotating pipe size, velocity, flow speed. Sometimes it can be like a schematic of a block of flats a tree of branches showing this is top floor with three flats, this is second floor with two flats. It's never that complex. The design work we do is quite easy to pick up.
What I enjoy about it
The problem-solving is quite rewarding. When you're building your own spreadsheet model or working on one and you're trying to find a mistake and you can't find it and you finally find it that's satisfying. Or when you're building a model from scratch and trying to get the equations to work, maybe teaching yourself something new at the same time.
Having an impact as an engineer. You have the potential to have quite a big impact, especially as you get more senior and make bigger decisions. There's a business development aspect to my role. I'll take part with the business development team on feasibility studies. We'll look at an area like west Edinburgh and think it might be a good spot for a future heat network. We'll run a feasibility study by subcontracting consultants, and we'll oversee and manage that.
Seeing the progress within that study is quite rewarding. We didn't know if it was a good area, now we've got all this information we could potentially use. It's the start of potentially spending £50 to £100 million and developing something. It's a large piece of infrastructure that could reduce the emissions of a lot of homes in terms of their heating usage. It could have a big impact on the world in that sense.
As an engineer, even if you're dealing just with numbers, you have a bit more understanding of what those numbers mean and how that could correlate to something actually happening. That's exciting.
What you learn on the job
You need attention to detail and curiosity. You need to know how it all roughly works to do your job properly. You can't just apply formulas you need to understand what's happening and why.
It's quite often about spotting mistakes. You can only spot mistakes by knowing all that information. By knowing how things should be, based on experience.
Working with people is important. This role at Vattenfall is very fast-paced. On Teams, I'm chatting to five to ten people each day, getting information off them. You're engaging with all the different business streams business development, commercial, the operational team. It means you have a better understanding of what's going on outside of just the engineering team.
It's maybe good for someone who's slightly business-minded, who likes to get insight into the other parts of the business. Knowing not just how it technically works, but the cost model behind it and the economics of it that's pretty fundamental to what we do.
My advice
There's a need to be interested in what's happening in the renewable energy world. I'm not really into politics, but I definitely read up on what's going on in the heat networks industry and renewable energies. Understanding those policy complexities is quite an important part of it.
If you're the kind of engineer who likes to be practical and hands-on, this might not be for you because it is office-based. You're not building things yourself.
But if you're someone who's social, who likes dealing with people, who wants to understand how different parts of a business work together this could suit you. Some of my friends who are engineers prefer to work by themselves, making decisions themselves, looking into stuff themselves. They wouldn't want this. But for me, the variety and the collaboration make it interesting.
