A professional who plans construction and coordinates operation of facilities for transmitting power from distribution points to consumers. Responsibilities include:

• Lays out substations and overhead and underground lines in urban and rural areas.
• Prepares specifications and estimates costs.
• Makes complex electrical computations to determine type and arrangement of circuits and size, type and number of pieces of equipment, such as transformers, circuit breakers, switches, and lightning arresters.
• Computes sag and stress for specifications on wire and cable.
• Plans layout of pole lines and underground cable and solves problems, such as determining height, location, spacing, guying, and insulating of poles.
• May be designated according to specialization as Overhead-Distribution Engineer (utilities); Rural-Service Engineer (utilities); Substation Engineer (utilities); Underground-Distribution Engineer (utilities)