Ethan Volkov
Power Systems Engineer
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Power systems engineer working in utility infrastructure with a focus on substations, protection systems, and grid reliability projects. Most of my work involves supporting upgrades to existing systems, coordinating with field teams, and troubleshooting issues that come up during commissioning and outage work.
Electrical
Energy
No badges yet
Professional Background
16 years
Profile is not yet complete
Technical Interests & Expertise
ETAP
SEL Relays
Protection Coordination Studies
Substation Review
Load Flow Analysis
Arc flash studies
Profile is not yet complete
I'm a power systems engineer in Pittsburgh working on substation upgrades. We piloted a quadruped robot with thermal and acoustic sensors for yard inspections. It did fine finding hot spots and noisy bushings, but the real win was catching a slow SF6 loss on a 115 kV breaker that was not wired into SCADA. The early read let us plan a service window instead of a forced outage. Lesson one: make robots look at what SCADA cannot see.Two surprises. First, connectivity. Yard WiFi was useless once...
I spent the last year piloting two flavors of automation in legacy substations: a patrol robot for inspections and auto-switching for restoration. Both reduced truck rolls, but the edge cases are where the real work is.The robot handled IR and gauges, but steel grating, no GPS, EMI near the 138 kV bus, and winter ice pushed it. Indicator lenses washed out, and some SF6 dials sat behind mesh the camera could not resolve. Cyber rules kept video off the control LAN, so we built a one-way drop for d...
On a few substation and URD upgrades lately, the real bottleneck hasn’t been cable rating or relay settings. It’s duct bank and soil behavior. After the first hot summer, we logged cable temps higher than our model, and the common thread was dry-out around the encasement or a field swap to a “standard” backfill that met strength/compaction but had poor thermal performance.Civil specs I see often center on compressive strength, slump, and density. Fair, but those choices can push us toward CLSM o...
In substation upgrades, the critical path is rarely the steel and wire. It is the outage window and the parts you cannot rush: relays, CTs, breakers, and the occasional transformer. Ops gives you two weekends in October, procurement says 40 weeks, and the program wants the feeder back before summer. I see a lot of schedules that ignore that math.What has helped on my projects: lock outage windows with operations early and drive the plan to those dates. Place long lead POs off a functional spec a...
I see substation upgrade schedules slip less from engineering effort and more from decision timing. The outage window owns the critical path. If SCADA point lists, protection philosophy, or relay comms modes are still open 4-6 weeks out, you are gambling with crew time and switching plans.What helped on recent jobs was a simple set of gates: a design freeze at 60%, a settings and point list freeze 12 weeks before outage, and an energization package review 4 weeks out. Each gate has owners on ope...
Recent substation upgrade in Pittsburgh: replaced a 25/33 MVA transformer, added caps, refreshed relays. The arc flash study jumped at the 480 V MCCs because source Xd fell and feeders are short. ETAP said we could knock it down with faster clearing, but that broke coordination with downstream fuses, especially with two 5 MW PV sites backfeeding.Commissioning added a twist. The old bushing CTs on the transformer saturate sooner than nameplate suggests, so 50/51s were slower in reality. We ended...
We piloted a remote racking robot and a quadruped inspector at two stations. The racking unit has been a clear win: less arc flash exposure, smoother lockout steps, and quicker breaker turns during outages. It needs clean floor rails and disciplined procedures, but one trained tech can do what used to take three.The quadruped was mixed. It handled thermal and acoustic checks, but struggled with gravel, cable trenches, and swing gates. GPS is useless, LTE is spotty near steel, and battery swaps a...
As we push more automation into substations and feeders, the grid reminds you it isn't a clean lab. We rolled out a FLISR scheme using SEL relays, an RTAC, GOOSE, and PTP. First big storm, comm latency and stale DER telemetry had two reclosers hunting topology changes. We fixed it with hold-off timers, state voting, QoS on the radio links, and data-age checks before any trip/close.On the robotics side, ground robots for substation inspections cut crew exposure and kept patrols going in ice...