No problem. Vendors are GE, Siemens, and ABB. I'm sure at least one is hiring. They generally prefer some industry experience, but a Masters or PhD would likely go far, especially with some research projects.
These models are amongst the most difficult out there as far as size and time requirements. One of the founders of GUROBI got involved with the industry recently to try to help some researchers speed things up.
If you want a decent example/starter model to analyze, there is a unit commitment model someone made in Xpress that is free online if you Google for it that shows the fundamental formulation although they are much larger in practice.
Unit commitment is the MIP problem that combines linear and integer constraints and tries to determine the least cost set of units to bring online for each hour of the day. Constraints include things like the minimum amount of time the unit has to remain offline before being started up again, the minimum amount of time it has to run once online, how fast it can move (ramp), how much capacity it has..etc. You try to minimize the costs of starting up the unit, the cost of the unit just being online, and energy costs. The economic dispatch problem is much simpler and asks, with the set of units that were given to me by unit commitment, where should I set each one. The commitment problem runs the day ahead at hourly granularity for the next day and is also run periodically throughout the day. The dispatch problem generally runs every 5 minutes 24/7 365. There are also other constraints like not burning down the transmission grid.
