This Energy Insights study explores and documents the aging workforce problem in the U.S. utility industry, with a specific emphasis on the problem of aging engineering and technical staff in the energy delivery line of business. It highlights specific utility aging workforce examples and presents best practice strategies for addressing the aging workforce issue. Additionally, this study explores the role that information technology ? especially enterprise asset management and manufacturing execution applications and streaming condition monitoring data ? can play in helping energy delivery businesses cope with the aging workforce crisis.

The purpose of this study is to give utility companies an overview of the aging workforce issue and to help utilities develop effective business and IT strategies for coping with the aging workforce problem.

"Refineries and power generators should realize that the aging workforce problem also contains an opportunity to significantly change the way business in conducted," stated Jill Feblowitz, program director of Energy Insights. "Strategies being developed by process companies in the wholesale energy industry are based on the premise that technology can be deployed to support process improvement and business innovation in ways that require substantially fewer staff to produce the same amount of energy at greater levels of reliability and at the same or lower cost."