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  July (2023) Member Spotlight: Po-Chen Chen (Exelon)

  Posted by Kevin Praet (Adm) on July 11, 2023 at 10:08 am

  @Po-Chen is an active UAI member and provides outstanding influence and contributions to the UAI community through any of our multiple channels, including, but not limited to engagement on UAI Connect, volunteering with UAI, involvement and/or leadership in monthly Community Conversations, and/or speaking at UAI events, plus so much.  As thanks, we are featuring Po-Chen in the UAI Member Spotlight. Po-Chen is currently a data science manager in Exelon’s Infrastructure and Safety Analytics team. He is responsible for collaborating with various internal stakeholder and external partners to understand business needs and deploy analytics-based solutions, focusing on premier customer experience, operating performance improvement, and increasing safety practices.

   

  Kevin: How did you get into the utility analytics industry?

  Po-Chen: While working in academia from 2010-2017, I had opportunities to work on big data analytics projects for utility companies, including distributed generation placement and voltage quality study in New York City for Consolidated Edison Company of New York, fault location study for Xcel Energy, and vegetation management study for CenterPoint Energy. Through these projects, it helped me understand the challenges in the utilities and the hybrid skills required to resolve the issue.

   

  Kevin: What project have you enjoyed working on most in your career?

  Po-Chen: I love every project I had the chance to work on. Different types of use case bring challenges from various aspects and have their unique requirements. For example, while working at Oncor Electric Delivery, I was in T&D Services Team, so the customers are from grid T&D. While working at Duke Energy, I was in Regulated Solution Analytics team, so the customers are from rate and regulatory groups. It is critical to have buy in from the customers and work together to deliver satisfactory results.

   

  Kevin: What has been your biggest professional challenge and how did you work through it?

  Po-Chen: One of the most challenge projects I led was the short-term distribution transformer load forecast, which was a real-time application for control room operators. The spatiotemporal correlation of data as well as the computation burden significantly increased the complexity of the project. With the help from the distribution operation and IT support teams, we were able to design sophisticated end-to-end process design and utilized advanced algorithm for prediction, to generate accurate results. 

   

  Kevin: If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice before entering the utility analytics industry, what would it be?

  Po-Chen: To become an elite personnel in the utility analytical space, it requires a person to have background and experience from multiple perspectives: electrical engineering, software developer, data pipeline and ETL, mathematics, visualization, project management, etc. It takes solid efforts to advance skills and there are no shortcuts. With the never-ending evolving technology, one should always have high level of curiosity and motivation to learn and grow.

   

  Kevin: What would you like to talk to fellow colleagues and members about in UAI Connect? Or, what issues or topics would you like to see more discussions on in UAI Connect?

  Po-Chen: I would like to encourage more discussions in UAI Connect and showcase more about their work in their communities. There are so many different aspects and exciting topics, including strategy, data governance, technologies, cloud, etc. More interactions and networking with other analytics teams from other utilities will help us moving toward a better data driven culture as a whole!

   

  Kevin: Thank you so much for sharing with us and for being a highly engaged member of UAI!

  Do you have any final thoughts, ideas, or comments you would like to share with your fellow UAI members?

  Po-Chen: Please plan to join us at 2023 Utility Analytics Week in Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando in FL, on 10/31-11/02. Ken, Junhui, and I will be leading the UAI Grid Analytics Community Conversation, and Exelon Infrastructure and Safety Analytics team will be presenting a use case regarding utilizing spatiotemporal data analytics to pinpoint outage location. We have got amazing teams across Exelon to attend this year. Hope to see you there!

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  Kevin Praet
  Membership Coordinator
  Utility Analytics Institute (UAI)
  Boulder CO
  315-440-3033
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  Kevin Praet (Adm) replied 1 year, 4 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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