Ben Dobson
Senior Power Systems Engineer & Team Leader (Transmission) at Mitton ElectroNet
Ben graduated with a BE(Hons) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering with First Class Honours in 2013. He was awarded the UC EPECentre Undergraduate scholarship in 2013.
After completing his BEng(Hons), Ben started working for Beca in the Power design team. He was heavily involved in SCADA design (primarily for Transpower) for the first few years of his career and gained valuable insight into communications in the power industry. As part of this, he was seconded into Transpower’s SCADA modelling team for a year.
He has since moved into the broader design area of secondary systems with a focus on Outdoor-Indoor (ODID) conversions and protection replacements. The ODID projects are technically challenging and aim to replace ageing outdoor switchgear with new indoor switchgear buildings. Ben has been fortunate enough to work on multiple conversion upgrades in a lead secondary designer role and have designed all the new secondary and protection systems in the new switchgear building and all the existing site connections as required.
Ben has recently made the move to Mitton ElectroNet as a Senior Engineer and Team Leader in the Transmission team, leading a team of protection setting engineers. He is heavily involved with Automation and has developed entire automated design drawings in AutoCAD for multiple projects. To facilitate this further, he has been back to university to complete an undergraduate computer science paper on Machine Learning algorithms.
Ben finds designing in the electricity industry an invigorating career and one that challenges him every day. The electricity industry has a great opportunity at present to lead society into a new era with a focus on innovation and smart technologies which all leads to an exciting outlook ahead.
Published July 2020