Q&A: Betty Fung, 22, renewable energy engineering student


Betty Fung

Betty Fung, 22, was born and raised in Hong Kong and spent seven years in Chicago before moving to Portland to go to college. She became interested in a career in renewable energy after taking courses at Portland State University in environmental sustainability. Fung realized if she wanted to find a job after college, her choices were nursing or engineering. She didn’t want a career in health care, so she started attending the Oregon Institute of Technology’s Renewable Engineering program. Her goal is to perform engineering work for a major utility.

DJC: What do you hope to build or accomplish during your career in this industry?

Betty Fung: I am being trained for power engineering. This is a part of the energy sector that has been ignored for a while. There’s a large group of (power engineers) that are retiring so it’s important to have a new set of us trained.  I’m also interested in smart grid technologies and applications, which would also mean working with a utility.

DJC: Why did you choose this field? What drew you to it?

Fung: My motivation was sustainability and then having a career. I wanted to do something nontraditional for a woman. One way to stay competitive is to be as unique as possible. Where I am is unique because I’m a woman in engineering and I’m relatively young. As long as I can solidify my knowledge, I don’t see any problem building a career within the next five years.

DJC: What sort of mentoring did you have during your time in school or afterward?

Fung: A large portion of my education at OIT has been from Dr. Robert Bass. He is the person who created (the Renewable Energy Engineering) program. When you teach, you can teach a model or a tool. You can have students copy and paste a replica of something, but if it is wrong, they will all make the same mistakes. (Bass) teaches us the tools, the math, the physics and the engineering principles so we can figure things out for ourselves. That’s driving us to learn.

DJC: What do you think needs to change in your industry now that your generation is coming in?

Fung: We didn’t really plan our energy policies or legislation, or make plans for the people who are working in those areas. We didn’t have the leadership to plan. The regulatory actions didn’t happen until an emergency happened. If it wasn’t for the Northeast blackouts in 1965, (the North American Electric Reliability Corporation) wouldn’t have happened. Those organizations should have been there as a precaution. I feel like we did it as a response to an emergency rather than a precaution. That needs to change.

DJC: Are you concerned about a lack of federal action on policies that would aid the renewable energy industry?

Fung: Obama has put a good amount of policies in place to make a difference in terms of the way we use energy. The past eight presidents … all talked the talk and none of them walked the walk. Obama came in less than four years ago and has implemented policies already that will affect the future, like emission regulations for vehicles. Carbon pricing (where companies are charged a fee for the amount of carbon they emit to fund renewable) comes up a lot, but I have some concern about that. For example, there’s a marble manufacturer, Marble King, which is the last remaining marble business in the U.S. In a news article, a representative from Marble King said China can easily dump marble anywhere in the U.S. and ship it anywhere at 28 cents a pound because their energy is subsidized by their government. But for them, it costs 21 cents just to make the marble because of the high cost of energy. If energy prices go up (under a carbon pricing scenario) we could ruin our industry unless it is heavily subsidized.

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