Matthew Parton is one of a new breed of young engineers working in the field of renewable energy. In the fifth year of a double degree (Engineering and Arts) at the Australian National University, the 24-year-old sees an enormous future in the industry. He currently works 20 hours a week at Windlab.

One of roles with the company is analyzing potential wind power sites. So what does Matthew look for?

"The most important thing is wind speed across the site. We use some of our in-house modeling, and also some software that we buy, in order to predict wind speed across an entire site. That's the most important thing.

"When I am looking for a new site one of the other things I also look for is: is it close to electricity transmission lines? It costs in the order of millions of dollars per kilometer to build new transmission lines to a site, so we can save huge amounts of money if the site is near transmission lines.

"Vegetation cover is another. Vegetation throws up a lot of turbulence which essentially is just bad for wind turbines and makes them break a lot sooner than they would otherwise. So we look for clear, open hills.

"We also look for [low] population density. Sometimes if wind turbines are built too close to large population centers you can get negative community feedback so we also look to try to put them as far away from population centers as is reasonably possible.

"Also - although this isn't my area - the project managers need to talk to landholders and get them on board."

Many people would see Matthew in a dream job - able to combine study and work in a field of cutting-edge, environmentally sound endeavor. So what would Matthew say to others wanting to follow a similar path? The advice is as down-to-earth as you can get.

"Definitely study hard! Every single day I am using maths skills and engineering principles that I gained either at high school or university. You need to have those basic technical abilities.  "You need to be quite self-motivated and have a lot of initiative to solve tasks. You need to have an interest in the area - it's a field that very competitive to get into.