The on-site course is based on the presenter’s 2018 book (CRC Press) “Electrical Calculations and Guidelines for Generating Stations and Industrial Plants” and associated EE Helper Power Engineering software program.  The seminar covers over 100 calculations in support of protection, operations, maintenance, and the design of generating stations and other large industrial facilities.  It is also approved for continuing education credit by both IEEE and NETA.

The 4-day comprehensive electrical engineering hotel seminar can also be presented on-site.  The on-site training is normally more cost effective and can accommodate up to 30 attendees.  Depending on travel expenses, the on-site training runs as low as $8,000 for California companies and around $12,000 for East coast locations.  Customer can also elect to add one day (around $1,000) to include plant related calculations at the appropriate time as the course progresses.

The 5-day course for generating stations includes calculations for a particular unit that covers transformer tap optimization, short circuit calculations, and protection settings and applications for one generator, one 4 kV bus, one 480 volt bus.  The attendees get practice at performing relevant calculations and the plant receives a protection review of one of their generating units.  It makes the course particularly interesting since you never know what might be uncovered during the process.  It is not uncommon for existing generating stations to have protection oversights involving lack of coordination, apparatus withstand times, nuisance tripping possibilities, and the lack of industry standard functions.  This also facilitates plant buy-in of any recommended changes because of the participation of company personnel in the process.

In addition to the 18 annual California hotel seminars, Sumatron has completed 30 on-site presentations of the course for utility protection engineers, nuclear generating stations, municipal utilities, cooperatives, investor owned power producers, and engineering companies.

The seminar is designed for protection engineers, system engineers, protective relay technicians, distribution engineers and generating station and large industrial plant design and support electrical engineers.

Tom is currently a consulting engineer for Sumatron in support of large generating stations.  He has performed protection reviews on over 35,000 megawatts of nuclear, coal, oil, and gas generating units and consequently, is well aware of protection oversights that can impact the production of large generating stations.  He is the author of the 2018 CRC Press book “Electrical Calculations and Guidelines for Generating Stations and Industrial Plants” and was the co-developer of the “EE Helper Power Engineering” software program. 

Previously he worked for Southern California Edison (SCE) for 36 years and had progressive responsibility as a protective relay technician, metering engineer, protection engineer, distribution engineer, apparatus engineer and for the last 15 years with SCE he was the principal electrical engineer for 12 large fossil fuelled generating stations.

Tom completed a master’s degree in electrical power engineering & management, and is a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.