 Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to Perspectives on Energy here in things like Hawaii. I'm your host Guillermo Sabatier, Director of International Services for HSI. And today we have joining us as our guest is Rocky Cease, VP of Industrial Skills at HSI and also founder of SOS International. And we'll be talking about how we train the new energy industry professionals. Rocky, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here again. All right. So very excited to have you here. And one thing, one disclaimer, Rocky also happens to be a good friend of mine. So definitely really exciting to have him as my guest. And this would be a nice flowing conversation. Rocky has been in the same industry that I've been. And in fact, I've worked for the same company. Rocky hired me over to SOS and then later was acquired at HSI. So Rocky, tell us more about how you started SOS and what need you, you know, that you met for the industry, that idea. Well, I started in the industry as a junior engineer at a company called Southern Electric Gas way back in 1981. So I've been at this a little over 40 years. In 1998, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation started its first system operator certification program. And in the original program, the only way to maintain the certification was to retake the exam every five years. So in 2002 and 2003, we got the idea that if we could build a training program to help operators recertify, in other words, retake the exam after five years and to help new operators that were entering the industry to take the exam for the first time. And if we could do a put together product that would provide assistance in passing that exam, that might be a good place to start a business. So that is in a nutshell is how we got started. Right. And definitely there's a huge regulatory component that came along after that, right, where there were a few changes. There was a couple of incidents known as the Northeast Blackout 2003 and that completely pulls the whole new set of responsibilities. So tell us more about that and how you met that challenge. Well, since we had just started the company not too long before the Blackout in 2003, a lot of our friends called and asked if we were the reason for the Blackout, which I'm glad to say we were not. But because of the Blackout in 2003, a lot of things happened after that. The United States Congress decided to get involved in the performance of system operators, among other things, but we're talking about system operators. So Congress got involved, they passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and it included many things. A lot of them were frankly, very frankly, good for our business. They changed from a certification every five years to a one-time certification with continuing education hours. And depending on your classification, you may have to have up to 200 hours in a 36-month period in order to renew your certification. They also began tightening up the exam. The exam's got more difficult to pass and they also implemented a simulation requirement, which was a big impact on our business as well. So those are some of the things that took place because of the Blackout in 2003. Okay, that's really interesting. And speaking of simulation, tell us how that has shaped the way we train our operators now. I mean, well, how it was back then because the nature of how we train, the nature of who we're training now has completely changed over the last five, 10, even 15 years. Would you tell us more about that? Because I know you've been the cutting edge of that. Yeah, sure. Simulation is a game changer. But until the late 2010, 2012, not very many people had access to a simulation. Simulations that time were built. They were replicas of the system that you operated and they could be a million dollars. And of course, if we look at the utilities in our country in North America, let's include Canada and that, many of the utilities are small. So a million dollars for a simulation is a big number for that. So one of the game changers for our industry and for our business at that time, SOS, was we developed a generic simulation that we could make available at a much less cost than that to teach the principles of system operation. In much the same way that a pilot can get into a flight simulator and practice flying a plane in various scenarios, we were now able to take simulation to virtually 100% of the operators, the 10,000 system operators in North America, and make that easily available to them so that they could practice operating the grid in a variety of scenarios and practice their response to those scenarios. That's really interesting. I've seen it and I've used your particular simulator as well and definitely really, really helpful. And now we're also, it's not just the system operators, but we're also now simulating distribution dispatch controllers. So that's another, tell us more about that. Well, absolutely. Because of the amount of renewables that are being installed at private residences and private businesses, in the past, our generation, for 100 years, our generation facilities were connected to the transmission grid and we had huge power plants, whether they were coal fired, hydro, nuclear or whatever, they were hundreds of megawatts. Well, now we've been able to get renewable energy, such as solar and wind, down to a much smaller scale and some applications are in the homes. Well, you have the transmission operators that operate the high voltage lines and you have distribution operators that operate the lines in your neighborhood. And so because of those changes, now we're beginning to have generation sources at the distribution level. And so now those operators need to understand as much about how the grid works as the transmission operators need to know. So it's an expansion of what we have done for the last 20 years at the transmission operations level. Now we're taking that to the distribution operators. Okay. Now, one thing that I'm noticing, it's going to be really, really vital to train these upcoming workforces. There's been a lot of data on the type of operator, the type of candidates as being hired now. It's not quite what it used to be in the past. They're coming from different backgrounds, but not quite traditionally the utilities. Could you tell us more about that? Yeah. When I was a young man in the electric industry, most of our operators came from power plants or field positions. Maybe they were substation techs, but they came into the control room understanding pretty thoroughly the principles of electricity and how it worked. Plus, they had been in the field or they had been in the plant and they understood how their facilities were operated and that was useful in the control room. What happened over time is the demographics began to change and we were less able to hire people from other parts of the utility business and we were forced to hire individuals either straight out of college or straight out of high school or off the street so to speak and bring them into control room. So that resulted in a whole different training challenge than we had ever had before. In the past, we had to take someone that was maybe not an expert but had some experience in their particular field that they worked in. Now we're bringing people into the control room that had no experience in any aspect of operations and so we had to take a true novice and work with them to turn them into a professional expert system operator. That definitely puts a lot of emphasis and pressure on the initial training aspect of their career. Well, this new career really because I've also seen a lot of them coming in from different industries, altogether different industries and then they go from the oil and gas into the electric which in a lot of utilities, they do handle both but it's really interesting to see that transition. What has been your experience with them? I'll tell you a story about that. I won't name the utility at this point but we had a class, an instructor led class. We do a lot of things online as well but we had an instructor led class and one of the individuals in the class was a candy maker on Friday. On Monday they were in a NERC certification class so they came in really knowing nothing and having to get up to speed. So it's just a matter of repositioning the training and developing a lot of new training because in the past we were able to assume that the individuals knew something about electricity and literally over a period of a couple of years we were now training individuals that knew nothing about electricity. That is an interesting challenge right now because we're seeing that occurring more and more frequency when it comes to either the workforce or there's lack of availability and I know that COVID has had an impact. What has been your experience with that particular site of how that impact our business? Well, you know, COVID, mostly what the utilities tried to do was protect their system operators. If you think about a control room, a control room is a 24 by 7 by 365 operation and so they operate all the time and they have rotating shifts and so their concern was that the COVID virus might infiltrate their operating staff and just wipe out the entire staff. You know, the most extreme case would be to lose someone due to the death of COVID to COVID and then others just being too sick to work and of course there was the issue of infecting anyone who hadn't already been exposed to the virus. So mostly the utilities sequestered their operating staff many of them for months at a time and they set up camping locations and cots and warehouses and and all the logistics that went with that and so that was a challenge. Oddly enough, most of the utilities were able to deal with that pretty well. That we shut down face to face meetings and our business, we traveled a lot. You know that we both traveled a lot and the travel for two years there was no travel and so now we're just now beginning to travel again as we've got the vaccines and the treatments and we understand the virus a little bit better. So yeah, it definitely had an impact on the operations, had an impact on the way we interact with the operators. We continue to see some of their still places utilities where they won't allow outsiders to come in because of concerns about the virus. As far as helping deliver some of the training recently now at HSI, I have noticed that there has been quite a lot of activity when it comes to live and structured online training and I taught quite a few of those courses recently and it has its challenges, right? But so what has been your impression with that? Well, you know, it was a viable alternative because the advances in the internet had come so far in technology like Zoom and other platforms where you could do that and so we were able to put a live instructor in front of people who were somewhere else in real time so that you could have that interaction. I don't think, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, the company over 22 years. I don't think anything takes the place of being a face-to-face in person in the same room with the instructor and the trainee. However, virtual, you know, across the internet training is as close as we could get. It's certainly more personable than online training with no instructor, just the materials in front of you and a lot of material can be shared in that manner and be done, and that sharing be done well. But some material, particularly technical material, is really nice to be able to see and interact with the instructor live even if it is across the internet. It's better to be in person, and like you said, you did it yourself. Not only you have a great reputation, you must do a really good job at it. So yeah, it works. It works. But I've seen, there's a generational difference, right? Where there are some of the operators, for them it's just like a fluid transition into this whole online live instruction, and then there's others who really don't like it, and there's something between, right? And it's, from my experience, it's been, it has not been too difficult to deliver a live online training. Usually a challenge mostly is engagement, right? To get them engaged. But I've noticed that if it's a smaller group, it's a lot easier. And usually in groups of no more than 10, it seems to be really, really effective. Speaking of simulation, especially when I get some of that, that really, really gets everybody engaged. And especially when you're simulating a book electric system with a grid. What is your, what is your prediction of where we might be headed, right? Regarding how this tool and how it'll enhance reliability and human performance and error reduction. Well, anytime you can practice scenarios, I mean, I think it would be impossible to imagine every scenario that an operator might face. So the first thing you have to do is help the operator understand the principles of electricity and the principles of operating the grid. And then you start putting them through scenarios. And one way to do scenarios is modeled on past events. And then maybe perhaps modeled on events that could happen, but maybe they've never happened, but they could happen. And then after that, it's a matter of repetition. And if you go through and you repeat doing something often enough, then it becomes second nature. It becomes subconscious. And so we try to walk the operators through what we call unconscious incompetence to an unconscious competence, where on the one end, the new operators, they think about everything they do before they do it. On the other end, you have someone that is unconsciously competent, and everything, so many things are second nature to them. And I think one of the things that we forget sometimes in system operations is system operations, the work itself is about 95% routine, maybe even boring, and 5% chaos. And you never know when the chaos is coming. It's just one minute, everything's fine. And the next minute, everything is just, you know, just falling apart around you. And so not everybody can handle that. So one of the things we try to do in simulation is to simulate that experience in scenarios where everything looks fine and then things start happening. So that you learn to, you know, decisiveness, decision making is a skill that can be learned. You can improve that skill by going through scenarios as much the way you can do training to fly, or you can do training to drive. The more you drive, the more skills you are responding to things. Same thing with system operators. So you can't do those scenarios in real life with enough frequency for the operator to call that training. But you can put them on a simulator and do it over and over and over until they almost, it's almost second nature to respond to some of those events. Well, one of the really important skills I see in the simulation, especially when managing emergencies, has been acquiring the skill where they're able to prioritize the urgency of those emergencies and what to handle first. And you and I both know the continuity analysis, right? Where this program does a lot of what-if scenarios for you. And it tells you the worst thing shows up first and you handle that first, right? And usually that's something that takes a while for some operators to actually get a handle on, but a simulation, usually that helps them when it comes to reducing errors, right? Because usually knowing what priority to put together is really important. And we've gotten a lot better at giving the operators tools to help determine those priorities. You're in a control room just like I was. I mean, 10, 15 years ago, when something happened, a lot of alarms start going off in the control room. I mean, voltage, frequency, relays, opening, breakers, closing, opening, closing. A lot of things happen and every one of those events generates an alarm. And the alarms would just come up on the screen to be line after line after line after line of alarms. Now we've gotten a lot better at using algorithms and other tools to prioritize those alarms. So the more significant alarms show up at the top of the list and some of the least significant, I mean, they're way down on the list. The operator may never see them at all. But it still takes judgment on the operator's part. They should never trust those algorithms 100%. You really need to pay attention. You need the skill. You need the training. You need to become very capable of making those decisions. This is going to leave you to my next question, right? And it's interesting. There is a lot of conversation now where they want to turn over as much control as possible to the machine. And as we all know, machine learning, AI is developing and becoming way more resilient than reliable. I myself have a little apprehension and getting my head around how can a machine handle everything when it comes time to do it. So I am still wondering what your opinion is on that as far as where we're headed and what you think is being worked on right now regarding that. We've cooperated with some studies done by University of North Carolina and Charlotte, Clemson University, NC State and some others. And that's one of the things that we've taken a look at is how artificial intelligence is going to affect the job of being a system operator. I think artificial intelligence will be a tool for the operator. I think that we can get better and provide better tools for the operator to make decisions they have to make. At this moment, I'm kind of like you. I don't know that artificial intelligence will take over that job completely. I think there will always be circumstance, like I said, you can't forecast everything. I think there will always there's always the potential for circumstances that are outside of the parameters of the scenarios that you've put together for the operators. You can't write a procedure for everything. That's another area that we talk about, what are guidelines because you can't forecast everything versus what are procedures where you go through the same steps and get the same outcome every time. You can't write a procedure for everything. You can't imagine a scenario for everything. So artificial intelligence is supposed to learn. How many events would the AI have to go through to learn it in order to be smart enough to keep it from happening again down the road? I don't know. I'm in a little bit of a wait and see. I'm a supporter of AI. I think it's will definitely be a useful tool whether it will take the place of a live system operator. I'm not so convinced of that right now. I think it'll become more of a partnership and it'll become a whole suite of enhanced tools. The operator will still be managing the shift, the operation of the actual grid at that point. A lot of things may be automated but I think initially it'll help relieve a lot of the clutter of information and I think of course it'll enhance human performance because there are some human performance errors that come with this overload of information and right now it's here at HSI. That of course is our human performance training and how to error reduction. That's another important aspect that we work on. There are several aspects of human performance. There's not only how do you use your training techniques, how do your trainers, how does your training material impact human performance but also how well the individual understands their own strengths and weaknesses affect their human performance as well. There are things that we need to do as individuals to improve our human performance but there are also things that we need the tools that we offer, the environment that we offer, the way that we apply the work and schedule the work that also makes human performance. Human performance is a big, hairy thing in and of itself. It's interesting because on my next segment we have a doctor at those functional medicine and he'll talk about how optimizing health and hormonal balance impacts human performance and some studies on how that hormonal imbalance led to some errors that had accidents. That'll be a good follow-up to this show. We're talking about human performance. It should be interesting. What is it that we're looking at now for candidates? How are companies attracting new candidates whether it's internal or from other industries? That's a bit of a challenge in our industry. The utility industry is what? 150 years old now and most young people think of as an old established industry maybe even boring. One thing that we've got to do when we're recruiting is to help them to understand that our industry is exciting and there are a lot of things going on here that it can be an electric utility can be a great place to work. They seem to be more receptive of the renewable utilities the companies that are working they consider renewable space to be new and exciting but a lot of those same things are going on at our legacy utilities like Duke and Civic Gas and Electric that have been around for a long time and so helping them to understand that those are exciting businesses to work in also changing our recruitment techniques changing the job changing the way that we train one of the things that we have to deal with some of the younger folks now is their attention span not universally not everybody but in general their attention span is pretty short because of TV and commercials and social media and all the things that they're used to so you'll find we're now offering training 10-minute snippets maybe even 30-second snippets depending on the topic and whatnot so that they don't have to be engaged for so long but they can still pick up information that they need for their jobs. That's really interesting and the industry is evolving, the training needs are evolving and then us as a training provider we're also evolving so we're striving to be in the cutting edge of that and there's some exciting new technology coming up that we're also looking at so to be real exciting any last final thoughts we got a few minutes left on the show like two but any final thoughts on things that we're looking at developing as far as training or training delivery Sure when I founded the company well back in 2002 the niche we were working it was pretty small I mean we mentioned earlier there's basically there's actually a little less but there's roughly 10,000 men and women that operate the grid in North America and those are the men and women that had to be certified so that was our core business was working with those individuals and so essentially we had a small company but we were very fortunate to have our company and enjoyed it very much but we were really a small company so now with what's happening and joining forces with HSI we're part of a much larger organization with many more resources many more opportunities to have an influence a positive influence on the business and where it's going so now we all for not only training for transmission operators but we're as you mentioned earlier we're building training for distribution operators we have also built training for power plan operators now we're looking at substation engineers and I don't know that at SOS we probably would have gotten around to it but it might have taken a few more years and our partnership our acquisition by HSI will allow that to happen a lot faster and you know it'll be a lot of fun for young guys like you old guys like me I don't know not that young anymore it'll be exciting all right we are now at a point where we're about to close we're a minute away but again it's amazing how quickly 30 minutes go by when you're having a good conversation about stuff you like with people you enjoy talking to thank you so much for coming on the show as a guest we're here at Think Tech Hawaii and on this show in particular our aim is to educate and spread the word about what we're doing and I think we strive to do that every two weeks so hopefully you'll be a guest with us again soon I hope so I'm very impressed with what Think Tech is doing and what not so real happy to be part of the show thank you for having me on thank you everybody