Electrical Engineering Intern, Miranda Brockmeyer, has spent her summer working in AutoCAD, doing tiebreaker redraws for outage and relay upgrades, and testing breakers and relays to make sure they work before being sent into the field.
She has made good progress on her AutoCAD redraws, and she plans to finish them and the wiring tags before the end of the summer. Miranda has also been sitting in on many meetings. Some of these have been about work needing to be accomplished during the outage, and some meetings with consultants have been about equipment that needs to be repaired or upgraded.
Miranda has learned to read electrical drawings and logic diagrams, how to test various equipment, and how to navigate a wide variety of apps such as Document Locator, PI Vision, EDS, and more. She has enjoyed learning what an electrical engineer’s daily responsibilities include. She says, “My most memorable part was during the weeklong outage. We tested and were replacing a breaker. When we put the tiebreaker into service and the breaker out of service, something in the logic/mechanism caught before it was supposed to. This caused the other breaker to trip, and we lost power to some of the equipment. This led to a lot of troubleshooting to ensure the issue wouldn’t repeat itself.”
This internship hasn’t affected Miranda’s view of electrical engineering; she still thinks it is an interesting, complex field with a variety of knowledge to be learned. Her future plans are also unchanged; she still wants to work in power generation or distribution, whether that be in coal, natural gas, or renewable energy.