I started on a slag-removal crew for a traveling industrial contractor. Two years of carrying 80-pound blast hoses through running coal plants, threading pipe that would be imminently destroyed by the online deslagging operations. Everything after is both icing on the cake and built on a foundation of relentless and joyful hard work.
From the boiler floor I went to work for Dayton Power & Light on outage planning. AES bought DP&L in 2011 and got me with the acquisition; I never left. From there: rotating-equipment engineering, planning for global and U.S. generation, Senior Manager over Global Generation Asset Management. The last four years of my corporate career I led Utilities Asset Management at AES. Reliability engineering, investment planning, traditional T&D planning (system forecasting, modeling, and analysis), and norms and standards, across two midwest utilities. That's where I authored PUCO expert testimony for the $240M AES Ohio Smart Grid Phase 2. Somewhere in there I taught myself Python because Excel stopped scaling. And somewhere in there I watched several "digital transformation" programs arrive, consume massive amounts of both labor and financial resources, then leave.
§ 01Why your enterprise software implementation didn't deliver the results you were promised
The big consultancies ship decks. The platform vendors ship dashboards. Both solve for the VP who signed the contract, not the engineer who was there at 2 AM. A tool only changes an operations organization when the operators open it the next morning.
Nobody in my control room ever reopened the eight-figure platforms.
That was the lesson. A tool that survives past the engagement has to be something an engineer at the utility can crack open, read, and change. Black-box platforms don't do that. Consulting PowerPoints don't do that. A well-documented notebook with a real model and a README does.
§ 02What I actually build
Two lines of work. Advisory, for utilities and developers doing real grid modernization — strategy, implementation oversight, regulatory support, expert testimony when the math needs to hold up under cross-examination.
Product, for the engineering teams that need tools they can read, fork, and own. BTM-Optimize, a stochastic IRP for behind-the-meter generation, because deterministic IRPs are lying to you about capacity value and everyone knows it. Circuit Error Budgets, applying the Google SRE methodology to distribution reliability, because SAIDI is a currency, not a scorecard. Data center power supply analytics and optimization, because that load is landing in places the traditional IRP models weren't built for. And a growing ML playground of outage prediction, load forecasting, and hosting-capacity notebooks that utilities can fork and modify.
All of it is grounded in the same worldview: the grid is stochastic, not deterministic. Your decisions should reflect that.
§ 03How to work with me
Engagements are 6 to 16 weeks, fixed-scope. Retainer work exists but is rare; I'd rather ship a thing and go. Audits (one week, one deliverable, one flight) are the fastest way to find out if we're a fit. The first call is always a diagnostic: 30 minutes, and if I'm not the right person for what you're trying to move, I'll tell you who I'd call instead.
§ 04Faith+Works
I am a Christian of the thoroughly Reformed persuasion. The catechism I was shaped by opens with a single question and a single answer:
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. — Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q1
The execution and application of this applies to my work as well. The grid is infrastructure people live on. Hospitals, home heaters, the stove where a family makes dinner. Keeping it reliable is one of the more concrete ways I know how to love a neighbor at scale. It's why SAIDI is a currency to me and not a scorecard, and why I don't think any of this is "just" software.
— Adam