Andrew Coley: Senior Telecoms Engineer
In the first of an ongoing series looking at the breadth of diverse roles we have across the Prospect energy sector, Andrew Coley from our Electricity North West branch, writes about his work as a Senior Telecoms Engineer.
I’ve worked as a radio engineer since leaving college, so radio communications has always been my line of work.
In 1997, my wife was working for what used to be North West Water, she was a scientist there, and saw a job advert looking for a radio technician in what used to be NORWEB.
Andrew Coley
I was looking for a job at the time, as the radio communications company I worked for were struggling financially and had just made me redundant. NORWEB offered me the job and it was good place to start. I’ve always found it a very a welcoming place.
North West Water and NORWEB later merged to become United Utilities, and later on in 2007, they sold off its electricity subsidiary to Electricity North West, which is where I am now. Different names and it has evolved a bit, but essentially, I’ve worked here since 1997.
For about the last 16 years, I’ve been a Senior Telecoms Engineer and I am part of a team who look after the control system that turns into reality what the Control Engineer selects when he pushes a button to operate a particular switch; we do everything from that point through to the big metal box in the substation that is the switch.
It is everything in-between: the databases, the configurations on the computer system that runs it, the communications paths, the fibre network and radio links out to site and the remote terminal in the substation that actually fires off the change.
You could say we’re like the backbone that makes sure everything works once the Control Engineer makes that click of the mouse on his computer.
In terms of my main responsibilities on a day-to-day basis, I do configurations for primary substation systems, so I program the actual hardware that makes the control system work, and as a senior engineer for the department, I look after any queries with the telecontrol systems, the databases, or communications.
If things are not doing what they’re supposed to do, or if we need to change something, then I’m one of the senior points of call.
Working across our telecoms network there are about 85 of us and in telecontrol specifically, we have about 16 in the team. It’s not shift work, but we do have a standby rota, it’s about one day in 10, and whoever is on standby goes out to fix the problem.
Automation systems
One of our main tools for keeping the electricity supply running is automation. If something happens to a power circuit and we get a power cut, then we’ll try to automatically reconnect all the customers affected within three minutes.
All our automation systems are designed to get everyone we can back on within that time. If a tree falls across the power line, the automation systems isolate the bit of line where the tree has fallen and reconfigure the network to reconnect the maximum number of customers that we can within the three minutes.
One of our daily tasks is that every day there is an ‘overnight report’ produced by our control room where we can see if anything went wrong over the previous day. We can identify the root causes if an automation sequence hasn’t reconnected everyone that it should and then put in place repairs, like getting somebody out to a faulty switch or other faulty piece of equipment.
Looking ahead
My role, and the industry as a whole, is always changing and there’s always something new to challenge us.
Right now, with the push for Net Zero, that’s going to mean a lot more technology is going to be needed. Take electric vehicles – for that to work the electricity network will need to be massively bigger and the way we control it will have to be much more comprehensive.
It’s not so much generation, but about using the electricity that we do generate more intelligently so we can run everything without the network falling over. These are exciting times to be a part of the industry.
It gives me a tremendous amount of pride to say I work in energy and that I help to look after a piece of critical national infrastructure.
The day-to-day work is rewarding to such an extent that my older son works for the company too and I would encourage anybody to join. It’s a good place to work, it’s like a close-knit community, it’s safety conscious and the company looks after the well-being of the staff.
We’re not seen as an emergency service, but we’re just as critical. How would the fire service or the ambulance service work if there’s no power? There’s not even Internet without us!
