Danson Joseph
The core elements of my job on a day to day basis involve doing a lot of simulations, building the models in a simulation environment; we also go out to sites every so often to get measurements which feed into our assessments. The other big part is interfacing with the customers to make sure they know what we need, and we know what they need.
The quality of supply side is quite diverse in that we have to engage with the customers but we’re working a lot with our own people inside, because the people who are developing the schemes come through to us to do work, but then we need to interact a lot with the customers to find out what the things are, that are peculiar to quality of supply for their schemes.
Over the next few years we’ll be working on a lot of windfarm projects, we have approximately 45-plus windfarm projects which we’ll be assessing for their power quality impacts. Each of those assessments takes about 6 months so there’s a lot of work to do for them.
The difference between this role and other roles that I’ve been in is there’s a lot of focus on the technical aspects, so I’m learning a lot as I go and I can also pass that information on to others. So it’s the learning and then the teaching aspect that I like.
The previous roles I’ve been in have been on a design basis so they were very good but on a different side of engineering. Being at National Grid, and particularly in the quality of supply area, is less practical in the sense of having to build plants, and more technical in the sense of finding out what has to be done to make sure they run optimally.