Top Innovators
Meiyan Li is team Lead Engineer of Transmission Planning at Eversource. Bin Huang is Senior Data Scientist at Eversource. Melanie Bennett is Senior Engineer in Transmission System Planning at Eversource. Jaryn Vaile is Principal Engineer of Transmission System Planning at Eversource. Junhui Zhao is Manager of Power System Automation at Eversource.
Eversource won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Maria Telkes Top Innovator in Distributed Energy'' for its Advancing DER Integration with Automated Model Validation Across Time Domains.

PUF's Lori Burkhart: Meiyan and Bin, please describe the innovation and its positive impact.
Meiyan Li: The team delivered a comprehensive, utility-grade solution to modernize and automate the inverter model validation and compliance process. The innovation comprises two integrated components: a plug-and-play inverter model validation testbench and an intelligent PSCAD interpretation tool.
We have encountered challenges. The first issue was the quality of the PSCAD models. Many DER developers submit the generic PSCAD models from the manufacturers, rather than specific models tailored to the actual designs.