John is an Electrical Power Systems Protection Engineer with Duke Energy. Based out of Charlotte, John uses advanced modeling to set protective devises on Duke’s distribution electric grid. He recommends students to supplement their engineering education with plenty of soft skills like networking and interpersonal communication.
Transcript
>> My name is John Hart. And I am an electrical power systems protection engineer. So part of what I do is setting protective devices to protect Duke Energy's distribution electric grid. I also work in the field with some of these devices, hands-on in some scenarios. And so basically, what setting a protection device means is that I use modeling software, I look at available fault duties in any given area of the system, and I set the devices that protect that area according to what I model. And so my job is to pull those models into the simulation software and I can throw different scenarios at it and I can see what the grid will do in response to those different scenarios. So looking for the relative available fault duty -- and when we say fault duty, I mean how high can the current spike in a given area if we have a problem? And so based on that, that dictates kind of how we set our devices. And then another big piece of my job is dealing with emerging issues that pop up where maybe one of these devices that's already out there, already been commissioned and in service, maybe it worked properly, but we have a problem that we can't figure out or maybe it didn't work properly and we had an issue. And they're kind of -- it's an after the fact, kind of like an outage follow-up sort of thing. So wee look into a lot of those scenarios. And that's not my primary role, but if there is something that the guys that do that on a regular basis can't figure out, sometimes they send it to me and I get to look at it. So we have a number of roles at the company that do have an on-call, you know, part and those type of responsibilities kind of bounce around. So you may have it one week and you may not the next week two or three or whatever. I fortunately am not in one of those roles. So I'm not an on-call guy. So if you catch me between 8:00 and 5:00 with a problem, great. And if it's not, I'll get to it on Monday. You know, that sort of thing. So it's pretty nice that way.
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