Timothy LeMere

May 2002

Job Title: Regional Electric Engineer
Employer: Wisconsin Public Service Corporation



Job Description:
As a regional engineer, I have the responsibility of maintaining the power distribution system in my area. Additionally, I act as the WPS electrical engineering resource for the local electricians and contractors, and also for the WPS account executives, line electricians, designers, and coordinators. A fair amount of community involvement comes with the job, as in training contractors, students, and first responders on the dangers of electricity.

Some of the more specific duties that the role entails are: Switching load around for maintenance and emergency situations, completing stray voltage investigations on dairy farms, managing line-crews and service restoration during storm conditions, customer transformer sizing and fault current calculations, feeder OCP schemes, path to ground and first responder instructor, business park design, RATV interference, voltage investigations, substation inspections, and power quality investigations.


UWP Experience:
College at UWP was a great experience for me. The classes are small enough so that the professors know each of their students on a much more personal level than at a large school, and are very sociable and offer numerous times to receive one-on-one help outside of class. The laboratory projects enabled me to obtain valuable experiences in working together as a team in order to obtain a physical, working project from a theoretical design under a deadline. Project management and team work is a huge part of my current engineering position, and the experiences that I went through from UWP certainly have helped me to succeed as a regional distribution engineer.

The small town friendly attitude, along with a great curriculum made my College experience at UWP very enjoyable and well prepared for stepping out into the real world. I'm a member of the WPS college recruitment team, and I always look forward to coming back to UWP to talk with my old professors and recruit new electrical engineers.


TYPICAL WORK DAY:
I typically start the morning by checking my email and voicemail messages, as well as my calendar to see what pressing matters are on the agenda for the day. If I'm committed to being somewhere, such as at a customer meeting or running a switching procedure-that's where I head off to. If there is nothing pressing in the morning, I start to take care of some of the paperwork that builds up on my desk as the week goes by. It usually doesn't take too long before I am answering questions for a line-crew or designer on one of the projects they are currently working on, which usually evolves into a site visit.

What I do on a daily basis is really prioritizing different tasks on a level of importance. One of the great things about my position is that I never know exactly what the day will bring. I carry my cell phone around at all times, and it is not unusual to end up doing something completely different than I had originally anticipated on accomplishing for the day. Outages, equipment failure, construction problems, customer concerns, loading issues, and code violations are all unforeseen things that happen on a daily basis, and may need to be addressed right away. This constantly exposes me to unique situations, which in turn grows my knowledge base and keeps the job exciting!


Sample Project Description:
Storm restoration projects are one of the most exciting events that I get involved with. I have acted as a field coordinator for Green Bay crews in the restoration efforts at our Eagle River and Rhinelander sites on two occasions, and on numerous occasions for large storms in the Green Bay area. Typically, severe thunderstorms with high winds cause the most damage to the distribution system by knocking over hundreds of trees, many which land on the power lines causing poles to break and conductors to snap, or at the very least cause OCP devices to operate. Occasionally, we get a tremendous ice storm or a heavy snow that will load down the lines and trees, causing them to snap. It is really amazing to see some of the devastation first-hand that Mother Nature can dish out, and it's a job that presents a sense of urgency, as customers can be without power for days to their homes and businesses.

On these storm restorations, my role was to coordinate where and when to send crews to get the most bang for the buck. This required me to stay one step ahead of the crews in order to make sure there was no idle time between one job and the next. In my experiences, this required making informed decisions based on the extent of the damage at various locations, and on the overall infrastructure of the power distribution system in question. Some of the factors that played into those decisions were the locations of critical loads such as hospitals and police/fire departments, number of customers on a feeder, switching paths and line/OCP overload issues, low voltage problems, and the amount of time required to fix any given situation. Some of these storms can keep you working for days if the damage is extensive enough!


Additional pictures:
Currently I am on a temporary assignment as a Substation Design Engineer. Below is a picture of a 46 kV Oil Circuit Breaker replacement project that I am working on at our Weston Plant. A total of five breakers need to be replaced due to the increased fault current from our Weston 4 project (500 MW coal fired generation plant.) In addition, all of the protective relaying is going to be moved and replaced. This is quite the project!

Weston 46 kV substation breaker replacement