Sam delivers technical leadership, expertise, and strategic insights to Idaho National Laboratory’s portfolio of multi-million-dollar critical infrastructure security and resilience projects sponsored by the Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense.
Prior to joining INL, Sam spent sixteen years working in intentionally diverse positions across the electricity industry including real-time operations and maintenance with three large investor-owned electric utilities, situation awareness and event analysis with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, intelligence with Electricity ISAC, and as the global security incident response team leader for Hitachi ABB Power Grids (now Hitachi Energy).
He has been a member of dozens of industry and government working groups, committees, and task forces dealing with reliability, resilience, and security issues and is a frequent speaker and panelist at forums and conferences. Why do students need his TADP 543 Grid Operations course? Sam says, “The grid has been evolving at an increasing rate for the last five to seven years, as fuel mix changes spread and intensify, technology evolves faster and faster, and we learn new things about how the system of systems actually behaves with every major blackout.”
Sam’s professional interests include real-time transmission and distribution operations, organizational behavior, control systems cybersecurity, and emergency management and resilience. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, and was a NERC-certified System Operator for a decade.
“Without a doubt the best part of teaching Grid Operations is getting to interact with the class on a professional peer level through the discussion board posts,” he says.