Ryan Melbard

May 1999

Job Title: Distribution Protection Engineer
Employer: We Energies



Job Description:
I have been employed with We Energies since I graduate Platteville with my BSEE degree in May 1999. I began as an Associate Engineer. In this role, I rotated between various groups including: Substation Distribution Automation Engineering, Electric System Engineering, Area Planning Engineering, and Distribution Dispatch. My job duties in these various groups included: supervising the Padmount Maintenance Program and the Overhead Maintenance Program, modeling feeders and preparing work orders to make system upgrades based on modeling results, created Microsoft Access databases for various maintenance programs, prepared switching orders for line crews and troubleshooters, and teaching dispatchers new c omputer programs.

In 2001, I was promoted to Engineer and I joined the Distribution Protection group. In this group, I have provided protection support for the distribution system, evaluated new and existing recloser and controller technologies, and managed semi-annual recloser operations count program to improve reliability and to meet the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin's requirements. I have also participated in a group that is using Monte Carlo simulation techniques to model the outage rates caused by tree contact in order to optimize the forestry budget.


UWP Experience:
My educational experiences at UWP have prepared me to make important contributions to my job. I have also been well-prepared for my additional educational experiences and career aspirations. People in the industry respect and understand the importance of an engineering degree from UW-Platteville. When I compare my educational experiences to other engineers who graduated from other universities, I realize that UWP provided a good mix of theory and hands-on lab work


TYPICAL WORK DAY:
A typical work day for me involves a number of tasks. I usually have to review recent outages to determine if protection devices, such as breakers, relays, reclosers, and fuses worked properly to clear the fault. If the protection did not work properly, I would have to do some follow-up work to determine why, which might involve contacting the equipment's manufacturer. Another common task would be to issue Work Requests for various maintenance items, such as battery replacements in reclosers. I would also be in charge of updating the databases that keep track of when this work is done.


Sample Project Description:
My recent favorite project was the Reliability Centered Forestry program. The goal of this program was to use system modeling and simulation tools to develop a circuit trimming methodology that will allow us to improve our customer reliability and/or decrease the forestry budget. The simulation and modeling try to identify certain characteristics of circuits to determine whether the forestry budget should be focused in a different way. This new methodology allowed me to use my electrical engineering knowledge while enhancing my statistical experience.