A few years from now, a massive thunderstorm will roll through Dayton, Ohio—knocking over trees and downing power lines. Today, it would take dozens of crews working throughout the city to isolate problems and return electricity to city neighborhoods. But when this storm hits, computers will automatically reroute power, restoring it to most of the city instantly. By then, Dayton homes should be equipped with power monitors, too, displaying real-time data, so customers turning on an electric stove will see a spike, allowing them to better manage consumption and costs.
These are a few of the features of the city’s planned Smart Grid. And when the Smart Grid starts running, sometime in the next decade, it will be in large part because of the work of Scott Kelly (E’88). He is a senior vice president at DPL, Inc. (Dayton Power and Light), and he’s responsible for the electricity that DPL produces, from the moment it leaves the power plant until it reaches more than 500,000 customers. As the top manager of the company’s customer services, he oversees the teams of engineers who are developing the futuristic Smart Grid.
Kelly’s career path started with an experience at a Carnegie Mellon co-op with General Motors’ Fisher Body Plant. At first, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to pursue managerial roles, but soon he was leading the redesign of a die storage system and supervising the plant’s maintenance staff. “It was a little frightening,” says Kelly, who at the age of 20 was in charge of people who had been working at the plant for longer than he’d been alive. He says that experience helped spur him on to a career that combines management and engineering.
His success in that career has led to the President’s Award at the 2009 Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference, the top award of the conference that brings together the nation’s top science and technology professionals.
—Rob Cullen (HS’02)
