Top Innovators
Josh Gould is Director of Advanced Grid Solutions and Enterprise Strategic Planning at Duquesne Light. Richard Saporito is a consulting engineer in the Advanced Grid Solutions team at Duquesne Light. Jessica Valentine is Manager, Advanced Grid Technology at Duquesne Light.
Duquesne Light Company won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Charles Steinmetz Top Innovator in Network or Grid Operations'' for its Gridware Gridscope Sensors.
PUF's Kerry Worthington: Describe the innovation, your role in it, and its impact.
Richard Saporito: I've been with Duquesne Light Company (DLC) for seventeen years, mostly in distribution planning. I joined the Advanced Grid Solutions team in December 2021 and have been leading battery and innovative solution projects like this Gridware sensor deployment.
The innovation's name is Gridware Gridscope Sensors, and they provide visibility on the grid. That's the positive impact. Duquesne Light's distribution system, specifically the legacy four kilovolt voltage class, doesn't have as much visibility as the newer twenty-three kilovolt distribution.
By installing these, we can better identify where the system issues are. There are thirteen different sensors inside each Gridscope that are recording data and events then sending alerts back to DLC so we can identify faults in real time. Now we know exactly where the problems are, what is wrong, and which equipment to dispatch crews with, so system issues can be remedied in fractions of the time we used to need.