Well, the engineers you want are the kind that even if the power went out daily they wpuld find a way to fix that. Engineers solve practical problems, after all. But that costs time they then can't use on solving the problems ypu hired them for.
And like ypu said, such engineers are in short supply, because not only do they have to have a good education and plenty of on-job experience, they also need to be highly intelligent and that is a problem of breeding (genetics) that no amount of schooling can fix and can't be resolved in less than several generations.
