From cable schedules to a fleet control room

Mandate

Keep a dispersed fleet safe, controllable and secure while it grows, and explain its technical risks to cooperatives and the board.

Outcomes

• Derated and retrofitted twenty-three battery containers after a cooling failure
• Routed all supplier access to inverters through a company-run gateway
• Migrated twenty-six island plants to an independently tested site controller
• Cut interconnection testing at new plants from nineteen days to eight

Decisions in context

I lead the people who design, control and protect our plants, and the platform that tells us what each one is doing. The appointment came as the fleet passed thirty sites and the board wanted one executive accountable for technology risk rather than several managers sharing it. Most of my week is spent on choices with an operational cost attached: whether a battery runs at full power, which supplier may reach into our equipment, which software we write ourselves. I present to the risk and safety committee each quarter, including incidents and near misses, and I attend board meetings when technical matters are tabled. I am not a director. My five leads own battery safety, control systems, operational-technology security, the fleet platform and technology operations, and the battery safety lead holds derating authority independently of me.

Reason for the move

Current role; considering one compatible non-executive appointment.

Mandate

Turn a set of individually engineered plants into a standard fleet that could be built and run at scale.

Outcomes

• Standardised container, inverter and cabinet designs across new plants
• Set up the Cebu control room with round-the-clock cover
• Grew the island fleet from nineteen plants to thirty-one

Decisions in context

When I arrived, almost every plant had been designed separately, which made spares, training and fault-finding harder than they needed to be. I wrote our first engineering standard, settled on one container family and one main inverter model, and built a commissioning procedure that each cooperative's engineer could follow. The standard was useful, and it also contained the supplier-access gap I found later. I set up the Cebu control room in 2018 with six operators; it now runs three shifts. Much of my time went on site visits, often with the cooperative's general manager, to agree how the battery should support the evening peak. The fleet grew from nineteen island plants to thirty-one, and I learnt how quickly a small company's informal engineering habits become inherited risk once a fund and lenders begin relying on them.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief technology officer when the board created a single technology role.

Mandate

Reduce site outages and fuel loss across about 2,300 remote towers through better equipment and monitoring.

Outcomes

• Rebuilt alarm logic so that a silent site became an event
• Introduced solar and lithium-ion batteries at 480 high-diesel sites
• Reported site-security and fuel-loss findings to the audit committee

Decisions in context

Towers taught me the economics of distance. A visit to a remote site could cost more than the fault it fixed, so I designed equipment and monitoring to answer three questions from a distance: what is happening, can we change it and does someone need to go. After the silent battery bank in 2013, I rebuilt our alarm rules so that loss of contact triggered action. We added solar and lithium-ion batteries at the sites that burned the most diesel, which reduced fuel deliveries and the theft that came with them. I reported our site-security and fuel-loss findings to the audit committee several times, which was my first experience of explaining field engineering to non-executives. I left because I wanted my work to serve households and clinics directly rather than through a tower owner's contract.

Reason for the move

Joined an island power company to work on grids serving whole communities.

Mandate

Design, commission and maintain battery systems for telecom exchanges, hospitals and data rooms.

Outcomes

• Led the firm's first lithium-ion battery installations in 2011
• Wrote ventilation and thermal checks for battery-room inspections
• Completed a part-time master's in power engineering

Decisions in context

This was where batteries became my specialism. I designed lead-acid installations for telecom exchanges and hospitals, and I learnt to respect their quiet hazards: hydrogen, poor ventilation and heat that builds unnoticed in a closed room. I wrote the firm's inspection checks for those risks. In 2011 we installed our first lithium-ion systems, and I saw how different the safety case became when cooling failure could lead to one cell affecting another. I studied part-time for my master's during these years, mostly in the evenings, which gave me the theory behind what I was seeing on site. As engineering manager from 2010 I led fourteen people and learnt to supervise commissioning I could not attend myself, relying on test records rather than my own eyes. That discipline mattered later, when the sites I answered for were hundreds of kilometres apart.

Reason for the move

Moved to remote power, where batteries had to work without a building around them.

Mandate

Configure, test and commission protection and control systems for utility and industrial substations.

Outcomes

• Commissioned protection schemes at eleven substations in three countries
• Introduced a recorded change log for relay settings on site
• Wrote factory and site test procedures used across later projects

Decisions in context

Most of my time here was spent in substations far from Singapore, configuring relays and proving that schemes tripped when they should and stayed closed when they should not. I learnt to read utility interconnection requirements carefully, because they describe behaviour that will be tested and must be demonstrated, not merely promised on paper. The most useful lesson came from a commissioning delay in Mindanao, where a relay setting changed for a good reason during testing had never been recorded. After that I kept a change log for every setting I touched, and the practice became standard on later projects. The work also showed me how much an engineer depends on a utility's operators, who know their own network better than any drawing. I moved on because I wanted to understand energy storage as well as protection.

Reason for the move

Joined a battery specialist to work on storage as well as control.

Mandate

Support installation and testing of switchgear and transformers on building projects.

Outcomes

• Prepared cable and test schedules for four factory projects
• Witnessed switchgear and transformer testing
• Reconciled installed work against approved drawings

Decisions in context

My first job was practical and supervised. I prepared cable schedules, followed installation on site and witnessed testing of switchgear and transformers in factories and commercial buildings across Singapore. The senior project engineer I worked for checked everything I produced, and he insisted that I walk the installation against the drawing before signing anything. That habit has stayed with me. I learnt that drawings, test sheets and the equipment actually installed drift apart unless someone reconciles them deliberately, and that electricians on site usually know where the drift has happened. The firm was family-owned and tightly run, which taught me to price my own mistakes in labour hours. I left because I wanted to work on the systems that control power networks rather than only the equipment inside buildings, and protection engineering was the most direct route there.

Reason for the move

Moved into protection and control to work on utility systems.