The importance of young professionals for dam engineering in Switzerland

In Switzerland, hydropower is the main energy source and contributes to about 58.3% of the total production. The 2050 energy strategy aims to increase this share in the coming decades. This increase is a challenge for hydropower plants. The maintenance and rehabilitation of these facilities is therefore of paramount importance for their structural integrity and resilience, to guarantee a reliable and optimized operation in the medium and long term. Tomorrow’s engineers will have a key role to play, and the great level of expertise acquired over the past decades in Switzerland must be maintained and transferred to the new generations of engineers. In fact, most of the dams in Switzerland have been constructed between the 50’s and the 70’s allowing a great level of expertise to be developed among dam engineers. The Young Professionals Group of the Swiss Committee on Dams, founded in 2019 and presented in this paper, has the role to ensure the knowledge transfer between generations.