Hey guys,

Just to add to my last update, I have officially only one more year to go until I hit the workforce as a fully fledged electrical engineer! I know, scary right? No, I've been pretty excited about this for the past 3 years.

I am currently in the third week of my second vacation, it is with Origin Energy in the Power Generation Department.

Origin Energy is Australiasia's leading integrated energy company. Integrated meaning that Origin is not just invested in one avenue of energy. It extends from the exploration of oil and gas in all parts of the world, to generation of electricity from coal seam gas (CSG) to gas and energy retail as well, it is a fully diversified energy company.

As I said before, I'm am currently a part of Origin's Power Generation team. Working mainly from their Brisbane office I largely focus on the support of the many power station sites. I'm working with Wayne Renwick, Origin's Production Capability Manager and am working with him to develope Origin's first training procedure to authorise non-electrical workers to perform isolations and switching on low volatage, and to an extent, high voltage equipment.

Besides this task, I'm am working quite closely with some of the electrical graduates and helping out with their tasks and learning a ridiculous amount from them. In these 3 weeks (2 if you discount the induction training week) I have learnt so much about how the power stations operate and the massive amount of work, from a lot of different people, that goes into producing electricity for Queensland and the rest of Australia. One project I am quite keen on at the moment is one of the sites in Origin's arsenal has had a massive electrical asset failure, I am working with the electrical reliability engineers and the graduates to develope a root cause analysis (which assets, why and what can be done to prevent it again) for the problem. It applies the knowledge that I have learnt from all my power courses at UQ, so it's extremely interesting and rewarding to be a part of this.

I am actually going out to Darling Downs Power Station, one of Origin's Power Stations, next week, so I will be sure to take a lot of pictures and tell you guys all about it.

Until then, signing off.

Adam