Utilities – literally, ‘those which are useful’ – are essential services that are sold to homes and businesses. Gas, electricity, water and telecommunications comprise the four utilities that unquestionably fall into that category. The removal of sewage, the postal service and transport services for the elderly and disabled are all also arguably utilities but, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll stick to those that involve provision and delivery.  

Complex Networks

What do they all have in common? Each are, in some sense, essential to modern living. Also, the delivery of each to your home relies on a large infrastructure that must be maintained. Take water: it must be pumped from a reservoir through a multiplicity of pipes; the pressure must be kept up so that you receive more than a trickle when you turn on your tap and the whole network must be kept free from contamination. Gas is a similarly complex network with nodes in your home and under the North Sea. Electricity requires generating stations as well as millions of kilometres of wiring. The telecommunications network is by far the largest: it encompasses the globe and even stretches up to satellites hundreds of miles above our heads.

State Interference

Historically, most utilities were set up and provided by private companies, many were nationalised for a period in the mid-Twentieth Century, before a programme of re-privatisation began in the 1980s. Obviously, there is a lot of money to be made from selling essentials as people have no choice but to buy them. For this reason, utility companies are heavily regulated. Perhaps the strangest thing in this process of re-privatisation is that foreign state-owned companies are allowed to profit from the provision of utilities, but our own state is prohibited from doing so. For instance, the French state owns 84.5% of the shares in electricity company, EDF Energy.    

Installation and Maintenance

The utility networks themselves are just a part of the infrastructure. The installation and maintenance of these massive networks requires hundreds of thousands of highly trained employees who know exactly what they are doing. It is incredible how efficiently these systems operate. We think nothing of drinking uncontaminated water.  We nonchalantly plug into a voltage that could easily kill us. Nobody worries that extremely combustible gas is being piped under our feet and into our homes. The fact that so little goes wrong with these systems (when something does it is headline news) is due to the people who work for utility companies being highly-skilled.

At People with Energy, we partner with companies, including utility companies, to find them the best employees. If you have the relevant skill set to work in this area, then we would like to hear from you. Check out our jobs pages and start searching.

Be the first to see our latest job opportunities, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.