Addressing the Substation Engineering Talent Gap Through Automation and Modular Design

The Utility Industry's Growing Workforce Challenge

Across North America, utilities are facing a perfect storm of challenges. The grid is expanding to accommodate renewable generation, data centers, transportation electrification, Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), and increasing load demands. At the same time, many utilities and engineering firms are experiencing a wave of retirement among their most experienced substation engineers, designers, builders, and technicians.

The result is a widening gap between the volume of projects that need to be delivered and the number of qualified people available to design, document, build, and maintain them. For substation engineering teams, this often means:

• Longer engineering backlogs
• Difficulty finding experienced protection and control engineers
• Heavy reliance on a small group of senior experts
• Increased risk of errors from overworked teams
• Challenges onboarding younger engineers quickly
• Growing pressure to standardize designs while maintaining quality and compliance

The question many utilities are asking is simple: How can we increase engineering output when experienced engineering resources are becoming harder to find?

This is where EPLAN helps.

Rather than relying solely on additional headcount, EPLAN enables utilities, EPCs, and electrical engineering firms to increase engineering capacity through automation, standardization, and modular engineering.

Reducing Reliance on Tribal Knowledge with EPLAN eBuild

One of the largest risks facing utilities today is that critical engineering expertise often resides with a handful of senior engineers. When those experts retire or move on, years of institutional knowledge can disappear with them.

EPLAN eBuild helps address this challenge by transforming proven engineering practices into reusable templates and automated workflows. Using this guided, rules-based configuration process, engineers can generate complete schematic packages from standardized building blocks rather than creating every project from scratch.

For utility applications such as protection and control panels, RTU and SCADA cabinets, feeder automation systems, capacitor bank controls, and substation modernization projects, eBuild allows newer engineers to generate accurate, standards-compliant documentation while reducing dependency on senior personnel for repetitive engineering tasks. The result is faster onboarding, more consistent designs, and fewer opportunities for engineering errors.

Helping Less-Experienced Technicians Build Panels Correctly the First Time

Finding experienced panel builders and wiring technicians has become increasingly difficult across North America. EPLAN Smart Wiring and EPLAN Smart Mounting help bridge this gap by providing digital, step-by-step guidance throughout enclosure assembly and wiring. Instead of requiring technicians to interpret complex drawing packages independently, the software delivers:

• Visual work instructions
• Sequential wiring guidance
• Real-time progress tracking
• Verification of completed tasks

For utility control houses, relay panels, and substation automation cabinets, this means newer personnel can become productive much faster while maintaining quality standards.

The benefits of using Eplan in the panel building process are significant. Most manufacturers see reduced wiring errors, less rework, faster production, and improved consistency across projects. All these benefits are found without the need for dependency on highly specialized labor

Improving Data Quality During Substation Project Development

Substation projects often involve multiple groups working from the same data. These typically include system planning, protection engineering, SCADA teams, cvil engineering, EPC contractors, and equipment suppliers. When data is manually transferred between so many disciplines, errors inevitably occur.

EPLAN Preplanning captures and manages engineering information from the earliest stages of a project, creating a digital thread that extends throughout the project lifecycle.

Information such as I/O lists, device data, instrumentation requirements, communications architecture, and substation equipment specifications can flow directly into downstream engineering processes without repetitive manual entry. For utilities facing staffing shortages, reducing repetitive data handling helps engineers spend more time solving problems and less time managing spreadsheets.

Giving Field Crews Access to the Right Information

Substation maintenance and commissioning teams frequently encounter another challenge: outdated documentation.

Whether troubleshooting a breaker control circuit or performing relay upgrades, field personnel need confidence that they are working from the latest approved drawings. EPLAN eView and Rittal ePOCKET provide cloud-based access to current engineering documentation directly from the field.

Eplan Collaboration Apps: Comprehensive access, easy collaboration

For utility operations teams, this means:

• Faster commissioning
• Improved troubleshooting
• Reduced calls back to engineering
• Better collaboration between office and field personnel
• Increased confidence for newer technicians

In an industry where skilled labor is scarce, providing the right information at the right time becomes increasingly valuable.

The Greater Opportunity: Modular Substation Engineering

While automation improves productivity, modular engineering may represent the most powerful long-term solution to the utility industry's engineering workforce challenge. Using EPLAN Engineering Configuration (EEC), utilities and engineering firms can move beyond project-by-project design toward a reusable engineering framework.

Transforming Proven Designs into Reusable Engineering Modules

Most utilities already have standard designs for recurring applications:

• Distribution feeder bays
• Transmission line protection schemes
• Breaker-and-a-half configurations
• Transformer protection packages
• Station service systems
• Communications and SCADA architectures

The challenge is that engineers often recreate these designs repeatedly. EEC captures these proven designs as configurable, reusable engineering modules that can be deployed across future projects. With Eplan, engineers start with validated building blocks instead of reinventing the wheel.

Capturing Expert Knowledge Before It Walks Out the Door

Eplan knows one of the biggest concerns facing utility engineering managers is knowledge transfer.

Many of the engineers who built today's transmission and distribution systems are approaching retirement. EEC helps preserve this expertise by embedding engineering rules, standards, and best practices directly into the design process.

Knowledge no longer lives only in individual spreadsheets, personal folders, informal processes or worse, senior engineers' memories. Within Eplan, knowledge earned through decades of experience becomes part of the engineering system itself. This creates a scalable framework for training the next generation of engineers while ensuring consistency across projects.

Enabling Smaller Teams to Deliver More Projects

The ultimate benefit of modular engineering is capacity. When engineering teams can reuse approved designs and automate documentation generation:

• Engineering cycles become shorter
• Quality improves through standardization
• Rework decreases
• Design consistency increases
• Project throughput grows

Most importantly, the organization is no longer constrained by the availability of a small number of senior engineers. A team that previously struggled to keep up with substation modernization programs, renewable interconnections, and grid expansion initiatives can take on significantly more work without proportionally increasing headcount.

The Bottom Line

Utilities cannot hire their way out of the engineering talent shortage. The demand for experienced substation, protection, and control engineers is simply growing faster than the available workforce. The most successful utilities will be those that institutionalize expertise, standardize engineering practices, and automate repetitive design tasks.

By combining automation tools such as eBuild, Smart Wiring, Smart Mounting, Preplanning, eView, and ePOCKET with the power of modular engineering through EPLAN Engineering Configuration (EEC), utilities can preserve critical engineering knowledge, accelerate project delivery, and increase engineering capacity.

In short, EPLAN helps utility organizations achieve what every substation engineering manager is being asked to do today: Deliver more grid modernization projects, maintain high engineering quality, and overcome workforce constraints without continually adding headcount.

Take the Next Step

Whether you're modernizing substations, integrating renewables, or expanding grid capacity, EPLAN can help your team deliver more projects with greater consistency and less reliance on hard-to-find engineering expertise.

Learn more today.