Jesse Stuart
Power System Engineer – Transpower
Jesse decided to study engineering at UC following an electrifying tour of the university's high voltage lab. Between semesters, he worked in hydro power stations, where he found a passion for power systems. While on campus, he used his time to design resonant transformers, build New Zealand's largest Jacobs Ladder, and upgrade the university's musical Tesla Coil to generate over a million volts! He was awarded the UC EPECentre Undergraduate scholarship in 2016.
After graduating with a BE(Hons) with First Class Honours, he joined the Transpower graduate program. He later took up a power system engineering role within their Operations group. During this time, he developed automated power system analysis tools to enable new, more ambitious studies. In 2018, he won the People’s Choice Award at the EEA APEX conference for using a particle swarm optimisation algorithm to optimise generator governor models. More recently, he worked on Transpower's Te Mauri Hiko initiative, automating power flow studies to assess system inertia as future solar and wind generation is installed.
Looking to the future, Jesse is working to spread computer coding literacy at Transpower and helping people to use the supreme power of data analytics to make their lives easier. He plans to keep learning as well, entering online machine learning competitions to help him learn more sophisticated analysis techniques. Its safe to say things are changing fast, and it has never been a more exciting time to be a power system engineer!
Published February 2020