Rethinking Conventional Wisdom on Reliability and Security

Deck: 

Challenging the Rules

Fortnightly Magazine - May 2018
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My father liked to tell me that you can't spell geek without an EE. I was driven to become that EE.

After graduating from university, I was a young engineer working for a few companies that taught me the same principles many inexperienced employees are taught today. I learned a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations and rules-of-thumb that I was told to memorize.

Although I was grateful for much of the knowledge transfer, I did begin to wonder whether any of my managers had ever questioned the validity of these statements.

When I came to the American Public Power Association in 1996, I was given the freedom to challenge the orthodox way of thinking. I met up with a few other fresh, science-based minds. We decided that questioning the common wisdom was not just fun, it was fruitful in expanding and challenging our industry's approach to operations.

I learned early on that fighting the established this-is-how-we-do-things approach takes data. Lots of data.

One example is the belief that underground distribution lines have less frequent outages, but longer outages. 

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