Blazing a Path

With the celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, Susan Taylor says there has been a great deal of change both in utilities themselves and in the role of women working in them, and in the working world in general.

By Jessica DeLong, March 8, 2021

Susan Taylor has seen many changes in the 50 years since she first walked through the doors of Civic Hydro, as Saint John Energy was known back then.

“When I first went to work, you weren’t allowed to be married and when you got engaged you had to leave.”

Susan was 17 years old at the time, fresh out of high school, and admits now that she knew little about the company apart from the fact that it was widely regarded as a great place to work.

“I knew getting a job at Civic Hydro was a good thing,” Susan says of the city utility which was renamed in 1997.

“People spent their whole careers working there.”

There were four others who started with Susan in 1971 and, like her, they have all had long careers with Saint John Energy. But there was a big difference with Susan – long careers in energy utilities were not the norm for women back then.

Great deal of change

With the celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, Susan says there has been a great deal of change both in utilities themselves and in the role of women working in them, and in the working world in general.

“Susan has been a true pioneer at Saint John Energy, now a project manager with our smart grid program.”

“When I first went to work, you weren’t allowed to be married and when you got engaged you had to leave,” she says, adding that was the approach at the time. “They actually asked during the interview if you had a boyfriend. That did not last long. By the mid-70s, that had changed.”

Susan has been a true pioneer at Saint John Energy, both through her career and particularly today as we build out the Utility of the Future for Saint John.

Now a project manager with our smart grid program, she became the first woman to be a distribution system operator (DSO) at Saint John Energy – a position she held from 2001 to 2015.

It was a bare-bones operation when she started in the position roughly 20 years ago – there was no control room like there is now, just a small office with a computer.

‘No room for error’

When the Saint John Energy supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system was used for the first time in 2003 to remotely operate a substation breaker, Susan was the operator.

“The first woman to be a distribution system operator (DSO) at Saint John Energy.”

Susan was trained to become a DSO at a hydro facility in Ontario, she recalls that when she first walked into the classroom, she was the only woman surrounded by men training to climb utility poles.

“By the time I took that course, I already had 20 years as an operations dispatcher,” she says. “I dispatched all the work and trouble calls. I was very familiar with the terminology, the kind of calls that would come in when there were power failures and so on. That helped a lot.

“But I knew I had to understand the electrical theory and that is what the course did for me. I also knew there was no room for error. There was a safety aspect to it – you are operating breakers remotely. Linemen had to feel secure and comfortable with a SCADA system operator who was going to remotely control breakers.”

Dealing with extreme weather

Susan recalls working through some of the worst weather events Saint John has experienced, including the Groundhog Day Gale of 1976, during which the city was lashed by winds up to 190 kilometres per hour, and the ice storm of 1998 that knocked out power for thousands of people.

“The world changes and it progresses.”

She and others worked several days straight during those events. As the dispatcher, Susan was writing out all orders for crews by hand.

“A storm like the ice storm, the amount of paperwork to make sure all the calls were addressed, it was massive. While technology can be frustrating at times, it has made things so much easier and faster.

“The world changes and it progresses. We have seen that both in utility operations and in the role of women.”