Lehigh Energy Systems Engineering Students Visit PJM

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In late February, students in Lehigh’s Energy Systems Engineering (ESE) program toured one of PJM’s Pennsylvania locations. As a regional transmission organization (RTO), PJM coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and D.C.

The visit was made possible by Lehigh ESE alumni Lauren Strella ‘15G and Scott Thomas ‘10G ‘15MBA. Strella, an engineer at PJM, hosted the students. Thomas, a Distribution Operations Planning Supervising Engineer at PPL Corporation and Adjunct Faculty member, arranged the event. While on-site, students had the opportunity to tour PJM’s Conference and Training Center and meet PJM engineers and leadership.

The ESE program is a 10-month Professional Master's of Engineering program that focuses on producing a new generation of technical leaders for the energy and power industries. A key feature of the program includes exposing students to industry practitioners, as well as cutting-edge approaches and technologies. ESE program director Dr. Rudy Shankar considers PJM to be at the forefront of the industry. With 65 million customers across the U.S., Shankar notes that PJM has an “enormous responsibility to manage the largest electric grid in the world."

In whole, PJM supervises about 20% of the entire American electric grid and is the largest grid operator in the world. It is also adapting to new requirements for the modern grid, including renewable energy resources and additional representative pricing and requirements for increased reliability and resilience. PJM is also constantly monitoring and modeling over 7,000 contingency situations, refreshing each minute, to ensure there is an effective go-forward plan should any equipment or generators encounter faults.