Justin Ritchie – Co-op Student Experiences Energy World

A double major in Electrical Engineering and Physics, Ritchie began his co-op program in September 2008. He graduated from UNC Charlotte in December and is now completing the remainder of his co-op work with the Program Engineering Group in Duke Energy’s Fossil-Hydro Division.

“Doing my first co-op in the fall was great timing,” Ritchie said. “I had just finished thermodynamics at school, and then when I came here I was working on scrubbers. As part of the work, I went to a lot of fossil plants and got to see thermal principles in action on a large scale.”

Ritchie has also been involved in Duke’s work with the North Carolina Solar Distributed Generation program and the Smart Grid program. The solar program is being designed to link solar installations at 425 locations into a system that can generate up to eight megawatts of electricity.
“The solar work involved looking at and evaluating the technology to link the solar cells and fields, which would be primarily mounted on roof tops,” Ritchie said. “The project really helped me learn in depth the circuit principles we’d been taught in school.”

Taking part in the field work of the projects was especially rewarding for Ritchie. “I definitely like the working environment here,” he said. “It’s pretty cool to go out to the plants and locations all the time instead of just sitting at a desk.”

His co-op experience has also shown the great demand for energy engineers in the future. “Everything in the power industry will have to remake itself in the next 20 to 30 years,” Ritchie said. “There’s a lot of planned growth. Nuclear is coming back, and there will be technical upgrades to existing plants. There are definitely opportunities in energy, and the work is really interesting.”