Empowering Women in Energy: from Classroom to Career explores the crucial role of STEM education for girls in shaping a workforce ready to lead the energy transition, highlighting the importance of early STEM engagement for girls and the diverse opportunities it creates for future leaders in clean energy.
UNSW Digital Grid Futures Institute is delighted to be able to offer recordings of the SOLD OUT event that was held in Sydney in June 2024. It is offered in four parts, reflecting the agenda of the in-person event hosted by EY.
The following transcript is for the first segment of the event: Welcome & Opening Remarks.
Transcript
Clare Sporle:
Good morning, everyone. Sorry to interrupt the conversation, but we will get started.
It's wonderful to have you all here on this wonderful, sunny Friday morning and to start the day with a sold-out event is just brilliant.
My name is Clare Sporle. I'm the Managing Partner for New South Wales here at EY, and it's my absolute pleasure to welcome you all along to this great event this morning, together with the University of New South Wales and the Digital Grid Futures Institute, around empowering women in energy and how do we focus on getting more women from the classroom into careers in STEM.
So, I'd like to start this morning by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of the lands that we meet on today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
I'd also like to acknowledge the important role that First Nations people play within EY, and the communities where we all work and live. And hopefully when you walked into our lobby this morning, you had a chance to pause and look up, and if you didn't - do that on the way out. We have a wonderful piece by a wonderful artist in our lobby "Calm Water Dream" which reminds us every day when we walk into this building that we are walking and working on Aboriginal land.
So, we're absolutely thrilled to be hosting this event this morning because it is so aligned with many of our passions here at EY. And personally, for me, one of the roles that I've had until recently is that I was the chair of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council here at EY. So, I've had many conversations over the five or six years that I've been in that role around inclusive growth. How do we make sure that we are being market makers for diverse talent in the areas where we know are gonna shape our world going forward? And hence, we need to make sure that everyone has a voice, and everyone is playing a role. And an important way that we do that is through our EY Ripples Program, which is the program that we run to make sure that we are having a social impact as a firm, as well as an impact for our people and our clients.
And through this EY Ripples Program, we focus on three different areas. The first one is around really supporting impact entrepreneurs as they look to scale their business. The second area is we look to support the workforce of the future and make sure that is a diverse workforce of the future. And then lastly, we are looking to support an acceleration of climate sustainability. And one way the ways that we do that is through making sure that our people have time and capacity to volunteer and support organisations.
We are very proud that in the Oceania last year that our people spent 33 and a half thousand hours, supporting either through volunteering or pro bono work in these areas. And we also contributed around $3 million in terms of sponsorships and donations to help those causes as well.
And an example, very sort of relevant for today that I wanted to share with you is the EY STEM app that we developed and rolled out globally, which was really aiming at inspiring girls in that age 13-18 category to follow a career in STEM. So, feel free to download that app, it is free for you to access. It's very clever using a gamifying-type approach to help inspire that population to follow that career.
So, EY Ripples is really important to us. Equally, we are very proud of the EY Net Zero Centre, which looks to pull together all of our intellectual property, our expertise, and all of our thought leadership around some of the big problems we know that we will need to face into going forward, particularly around energy transition and broader sustainability. And I know that that's a topic that many of you in the audience are focused on, on a day-to-day basis in your careers as well.
But I know that you signed up for today because you wanted to hear from the wonderful people that are gonna be sitting on these stools shortly. So, I will hand over to John Fletcher, who's the Director of the Digital Grid Futures Institute, to share with you a little bit more around the institute and also what we'll be focusing on here today.
So, thank you again for all coming in.
Prof. John Fletcher:
Thank you, Clare, for that lovely introduction and welcome to this event. It's fabulous to see so many people here.
As Clare says, I'm Professor John Fletcher, and I'm from the School of Electrical Engineering in telecommunications at the University of New South Wales, and I'm fortunate enough to be given the role of directing the Digital Grid Futures Institute amongst a whole range of other things that I am tasked with doing.
So, one of the main things I'm going to talk about in the brief time I have here this morning is the energy transition, and in particular the workforce and the numbers around the workforce challenges that we will meet in this energy transition that we're going through. And this slide kind of says it all, it's a huge transition, it's much bigger than just going from walking to horsepower to fuel powered transportation. And of course, one of the considerable impacts that electrification will have will be things like electrifying transportation.
So, the electrical grid is changing. The electrical grid is really where my main area of interest is in, my interests are in things called power converters. Power converters are playing a really important role in underpinning the integration of renewables to the grid, the integration of storage, the electrification of transportation. So, when I started my PhD in power electronics, I never thought that I'd come to this stage where it is, you know, one of the key enabling technologies of this energy transition.
And of course it's not just engineering, the energy transition is now feeling its way into a whole range of new sectors. This is a piece from a news article, I think couple of days ago yesterday, just demonstrating how important having a workforce that's literate in the energy transition and energy in general is a really important part of how the community grapples with many of the changes in behaviour that we’ll face as we go through this huge transition.
Recently, I was asked to give a delegation from Singapore a talk about these workforce issues, and these are where these slides come from. And really, when I sat down and started creating these slides and looking at what the challenge is, I suddenly realized how huge it was.
So, this slide is trying to demonstrate what we call a conventional route from a school, a child starting at school, going through infant school, primary, high school, doing a degree in engineering, and then getting enough experience as an engineer to actually start delivering things. And the timescales are really quite long, so if we're thinking about where lies in that slide for a school kid that starts today, they're only just gonna be finishing primary school. So, a 5-year-old going into school today will come out 2043 as a trained engineer.
Now by 2043, the targets and the ambitions we have for Net Zero would place us kind of quite close to finishing the job if we actually follow the trajectories we're thinking of. So, it's made us think at the university, how do we address that challenge given the numbers that we have, and the numbers and the targets we're trying to meet? And to give some context to it, if we look at her high school kids, I think last year there was 68,000 high school children did the High School Certificate.
Of those, approximately 3,000 students did enough maths to go into an engineering degree, and if we stretched the mathematics requirements a little to be a little bit softer, then maybe extension one would be good enough.
And when you add those numbers together, you can see the best case is about 12,000 students doing enough maths to come into engineering every year. And that's if all of them decide to do engineering, which is part of the topic of the day, how do we put a convincing argument to students to take on what is really quite a challenging school and university career?
And then when we look at the forecasts, the forecasts are about 11,000 jobs per year, that's a very conservative forecast, it's probably gonna be much bigger than that. And you can see there's not a particularly good match there.
If we think about 3,000 students doing Extension 2 Maths, if we're lucky, we might convert half of those convincingly to do engineering, and the numbers are orders of magnitude of out of scale there.
So how do we address it? And some of the things that we are doing as part of the Digital Grid Futures Institute, we're looking at how we engage students through their school career, building up what we call energy literacy. So that's about understanding what energy is, where we use it, how important it is, how do you look at your bill, how does renewables work? All those things that we hear about on the radio, but maybe don't fully understand.
So, we've gamified that. So, there's a game that through the Digital Futures Institute, we've helped develop, which gives primary school kids an opportunity to download this app that is gamifying the part of the transition. And by doing that, we're hoping that then these younger school kids take up this role of really engaging a little bit more with energy in particular, but also then thinking about engineering as a career.
So, there are many other things we're doing and some of those we'll be talking about later on during the panel session.
The other way and the quicker way of generating a bigger workforce is by reskilling engineers. So, taking engineers who are coming from backgrounds and careers that might be becoming redundant and reskilling them, retraining them to be able to address some of these challenges with new technologies, for example, integration into the grid and understanding the complexities in those systems. Now, if we retrain engineers, the timescale is much quicker, you know, two years of retraining education, couple of years of experience, and maybe that gives us a four-year timescale by which we can start developing that workforce that we are definitely gonna need.
And we are gonna need it because there's a lot of reliance on migration of engineers as the whole area, the energy transition takes hold across the globe. We will be competing with all the other nations, not just in terms of the resources and the equipment, but also in the workforce area. So, we really do have to gear ourselves up to this challenge.
I don't have all the answers. All I have is some of the numbers and an appreciation of how challenging some of these engineering areas really are.
One of the things we don't have are really good studies that look at how we address particularly the gender balance, which is one of the main topics of today.
This is the only study we could find, but it's heartening to see that if we do put money, investment of effort, and the right people in front of the right students, we can make a difference.
And that's one of the aspects that we'll be exploring in the panels today.
An example here is The Orbispace initiative, where we have been able to track how much impact that particular initiative has on interest in STEM related subjects. And so, we've compared the numbers of students who have expressed an interest in engineering and in maths from the standard cohort of school kids with ones that have been through The Orbispace Initiative, and we can see that it does have a big impact on interest within that female cohort of students.
You will hear much more about this during the panel sessions, so I'm not gonna dwell too much on this slide, but it gives you an idea of how much effort and time we can put in, and what the rewards will be.
So, this slide is identifying how we hope to scale up The Orbispace Initiative, and this immersive initiative where we really do put a lot of effort into showing what engineering really is and trying to remove some of the myths about engineering.
We also have the EmpowerHER Initiative. And again, this is bringing together what we're trying to do with the Digital Grid Futures Institute in conjunction with The Orbispace Initiative.
The Digital Grid Futures Institute is an institute that's solely funded by the University of New South Wales, essentially as a team of three: myself, Sharon, and a communications engagement officer.
And we are through that investment, not just looking at the technical solutions, but also trying to grapple with these workforce initiatives and how we address this challenge.
Okay, I think I've had my 10 minutes, probably more than 10 minutes. Thank you for listening.