WHICH IS A MIXED BLESSING: Automation Is Engineering the Jobs Out of Power Plants. “As maintenance-intensive coal-fired power plants—chock full of rotating equipment and leak-prone pipes and valves, not to mention conveyer belts and coal ash handling equipment—are retired they are being replaced to a large extent by gas-fired units that make full use of sensors, predictive maintenance software, and automated control systems. As a result, the extensive use of analytics and automation within natural gas-fired power plants means that staffing levels can be cut to a fraction of what they were a decade ago.”