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  October (2023) Member Spotlight: Sacha Fontaine (SAS)

  Posted by Kevin Praet (Adm) on October 3, 2023 at 12:00 pm

  @Sacha 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, and so much more. To thank him for his contributions , we are featuring him in the UAI Member Spotlight. Sacha Fontaine serves as the Principal Utility Consultant of the Power & Utilities Innovation Group at SAS Institute. After 20 years working in utility transmission and distribution operation centers and on grid modernization and renewables integration with Duke Energy, Hydro-Quebec, GE and Siemens, he now creates solutions to help electric utilities identify how data analytics can resolve or improve business challenges. In addition, his unique skills have assisted in creating solutions surrounding a wide variety of obstacles apparent in the integration of renewables, energy forecasting, asset health issues and, most recently, wildfire mitigation.

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

  Sacha: I trained as an Electrical Engineer and started out at GE working on products for utilities, which led to my career path working in electric utilities. As a young engineer, I focused my continued education on grid modernization and in 2009 as Department of Energy grants led to projects on AMI, grid segmentation/hardening and utility-level renewable energy, I was ready and eager to jump in.

  On one of my first such projects, I remember thinking that the new grid sensing equipment I was working had so much untapped data and it was like having an open faucet right over a drain. I saw that as an opportunity to plunge into utility analytics to make better use of the technology and improve business outcomes. One of the things I love about working at SAS is helping a customer in that same situation, and when they see how easy data analytics can and should be.

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

  Sacha: I’ve been involved in several exciting projects throughout my career but currently, I’ve been captivated by a new Computer Vision engine that has had several applicable use cases and generated results in record time. It has truly shown the acceleration of AI in the utility industry in the past few years. Using drones and crowdsourced cameras, and working with some brilliant data sciences, we created a multiple-stage image analytics model. Unlike fixed cameras in manufacturing, these cameras are moving on all three axes and this approach has been much more effective. On top of that, it’s trained on public and private datasets that incrementally add to the model’s training assets, increasing its ability to detect anomalies.

  Combining this technological advancement with the existing expertise in relating images to GIS files vastly simplifies viewing the results for utility personnel. The tremendous hours of video footage would be unfeasible for an individual to review. However, our near-instantaneous analysis and detection of the type of asset as well as the potential failure signs make this technology completely user friendly. There’s even more potential using high-def images as well as thermal and other kinds of imaging – and as the model detects changes, the way it sees the image becomes adaptive.

  It’s becoming much more popular as the FAA is offering more and more waivers to use drones and there’s more interest in crowdsourced imagery, such as using dashcam footage to look for failures. You

  don’t have to drive your own trucks. We bring in the traditional helicopter and fixed wing generated images as well. This is the leading edge of utility analytics and I really enjoy working with these kinds of projects.

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

  Sacha: The biggest challenge has been reluctance to change, and the related challenge of trust in new technology. There’s a “fear of the black box,” in that sometimes the analytics work we do is seen as being done in a closed room. The outcome is not necessarily well received by those who have been in operations for a long time, doing things a specific way. At SAS, we addressed this by using automated natural language explanations for critical decision points in the model that are documented, even if they are relatively minor. That way it can be explained in the future when questions come up for internal stakeholders and external stakeholders like regulators.

  Decisions need to be made, but if you can explain it, people are more willing to accept the change because they understand the logic behind it.

  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?

  Sacha: My biggest piece of advice would be to just jump right in. There is no industry untouched by data analytics and it will be an important part of most jobs. Your domain experience is more important that your level of data science knowledge and there are plenty of analytics tools out there to help you with the data science.

  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?

  Sacha: I’m so glad you asked! I host an annual gathering at SAS for our users called the Utility Analytics Board (UAB), it’s a venue for utility professionals who work in any capacity on utility analytics to share best practices. Out of the UAB, we’ve seen board members connect with each other from different utilities to actually work out some problems.

  At UAI Connect we have the advantage of continuous contact, which is great, but I would love to see UAI members connect and collaborate in the more intense, workshop-style colloquium of UAB. That stimulates innovation. Just like the scientific community, the utility analytics community learns from one another, propelling each other through the same challenges and successes.

  As for topics, here are a few that I think about often:

  · EV adoption is going to affect new vehicle sales in the very short to medium term. When it makes economic sense, a technology gets adopted. EVs really affect traditional load profiles and, in the longer term, the potential of EV-to-grid generation.

  · We’re all seeing more frequent severe weather events. Utilities approach resiliency from different angles, so it’s helpful to see how those approaches could be applied across the industry. Whether that’s traditional hardening such as undergrounding, or through asset health monitoring, situational awareness or advanced technologies such as drone imagery or analytic innovations like our Grid Guardian AI technology.

  · I’m currently learning more about the real cost of the Cloud. There’s an assumption it will be cheaper, faster, easier, but that is sometimes challenged when it gets into real operations. When we are working with utilities to move to the Cloud, we’ve seen some who were surprised

  by the level of computational Cloud costs, and there are ways to help them counter that. It’s similar to the early days of physical computing when CPU and memory costs were significant, so code optimization was important.

  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?

  Sacha:

  First, I’d like to encourage the readers to join our SAS Community on UAI Connect to check out our library, which highlights the utility analytics projects we are enthusiastic about. It’s a great place to continue this conversation, explore questions around utility analytics and start discussions with SAS domain experts and the utility members who participate. I am involved as a means to stay close to my customers, to understand their needs and out of a sense of sincere curiosity for the field I have dedicated over 20 years of my life to. Open collaboration based on needs, challenges and a sincere partnership ends up being beneficial for everyone.

  *UAI Utility Members are encouraged to JOIN the SAS Analytics Insight Communuty on UAI Connect where they will have access to a variety of different analytics resources and networks. Request to join using the link below and reach out to kpraet@utilityanalytics.com if you run into any issues.

  Join SAS Analytic Insights Community Today: https://uaievents.wufoo.com/forms/z1k90s5i1knptby/

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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, 1 month ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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