Tuesday
8:00–8:15 a.m.
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Neil Stiller, Rochester Public Utilities, Chair of the MIPSYCON Planning Committee
General Session
8:15 a.m.–noon
Moderator: Neil Stiller
Co-Moderators: Greg Schutte
Room Moderators: John Berzins, Dave Bisel
8:15–9:05 a.m.
Mental Health and Burnout
Patrick Kelley, Critical Path Security
9:10–10:00 a.m.
Ethics: Ethical Lessons from an $8.5 Million Fraud
Nathan Mueller, Integrative Ethics, LLC
This presentation is based on an $8.5 million embezzlement perpetrated between 2003–2007. There were circumstances that led to fraud, recovery, and ethical lessons learned along the way.
10:00–10:15 a.m. – Break
10:15–11:05 a.m.
Iron Nitride: a Non-Rare-Earth Containing Permanent Magnet
Francis Johnson, Niron Magnetics, Inc.
Niron Magnetics, Inc. is commercializing Iron Nitride, a high-performance, completely rare earth-free permanent magnet technology. Iron Nitride will act as an economical substitute for several grades of both sintered and bonded NdFeB magnets. Niron Iron Nitride technology is based on progress achieved by the University of Minnesota under work supported by the Department of Energy Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies ARPA-E REACT program. These magnets are based on a compound which has high saturation magnetization and a moderate magnetocrystalline anisotropy due to a tetragonal crystal structure. Iron Nitride is manufactured from low-cost, noncritical elemental components. The unique characteristics of Iron Nitride include a magnetic strength higher than most grades of NdFeB permanent magnets. Test data also indicates that iron nitride exhibits superior temperature stability when compared to NdFeB. Niron magnets are positioned to substitute for NdFeB in applications such as motors with high torque output.
11:10 a.m.–noon
From Risk to Resilience: Strategic Wildfire Mitigation for Utilities
Chelsea Cole, Filsinger Energy Partners
Wildfires increasingly threaten communities, infrastructure, and utility operations. This session highlights how utilities prevent and respond to wildfire risks through: A) Ignition Prevention – vegetation management, equipment hardening, advanced monitoring; B) Operational Planning – proactive strategies to enhance resilience and reliability; C) Collaboration – working with regulators, first responders, and communities; and D) Lessons Learned – turning past incidents into actionable safety improvements.
Noon–1:00 p.m. – Lunch Break
Concurrent Sessions
1:00–5:00 p.m.
Civil Structural I Track
Ballroom AB
Moderator: Dan Sargeant
Co-Moderators: Sarah Simpson, Kerby Nester
1:00–1:50 p.m.
The Urban Challenge in Design
Nelson Vang, Mark Ziegler, HDR, Inc.
Building or replacing a transmission line through urban areas presents complex challenges that affect design, land rights, environmental considerations, construction logistics, and stakeholder coordination. This case study focuses on a 69kV transmission line rebuild in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where the aging 50+ year-old infrastructure runs through densely populated residential neighborhoods, commercial and manufacturing zones, and environmentally sensitive areas. The project required adaptive design strategies, extensive coordination with local partners, and careful construction planning to minimize disruption and meet modern standards. Key lessons learned highlight the importance of integrated planning and proactive engagement in successfully delivering transmission upgrades in urban environments.
1:55–2:45 p.m.
Advanced Conductors: The How and Why
Josh Sebolt, Jess Kurpius, Burns & McDonnell
Advanced conductors are often suggested as a solution for the reuse of existing structures and reducing sag, but what allows them to excel in these areas? This presentation will explore the causes of conductor sag: creep, thermal elongation, and mechanical elongation. Also discussed will be the sometimes-competing variables when selecting a conductor such as size, thermal and ice sag, ampacity, cost, tension, structure height, and vibration. Attendees will be challenged to identify the variables most important to them when selecting a conductor.
2:45–3:15 p.m.
Break
3:15–4:05 p.m.
Civil and Environmental Land Acquisition Considerations for Power Delivery Products
Cody LoMonaco, Matthew Bell, Burns & McDonnell
The rise in data centers to support computing needs has created an exponential demand for electrical power assets, requiring that land be acquired quickly. Land acquisition must be carried out efficiently but with limited time to identify all the potential risks inherent to a given site location. If these risks are not identified before land is acquired, there could be unexpected and serious impacts on project financial considerations and outage planning.
This presentation intends to outline desktop review methods using publicly available information along with engineering judgement to identify potential risks. This will provide owners with various tools and techniques to quickly identify more of the potential civil, environmental, and geotechnical risks.
4:10–5:00 p.m.
Fargo Moorhead Diversion Project Utility Impacts
Troy Knutson, Cass County Electric Cooperative; Tony Adensam, Minnkota Power Cooperative, Inc.
The FM Diversion is a $3.2 billion flood control project being built by the USACE, consisting of about 30 miles of a channel around the Fargo Moorhead community as well as approximately 20 miles of levees. This presentation details the many complexities of utility crossings with many local, state, and federal entities involved.
Large Loads Track
Ballroom CD
Moderator: Mike Marz
Co-Moderators: Ruth Pallapati, Will Lovelace
1:00–1:50 p.m.
Navigating the Demand of Large Load Customers and Their Impacts to Grid Stability
Ravi Varanasi, 1898 & Co.
The rapid growth of data centers presents major challenges for electric grid integration, particularly regarding power system stability and the management of highly variable load profiles. With their substantial and often concentrated electricity consumption, data centers can cause significant fluctuations in both local and regional demand, placing additional stress on transmission infrastructure and complicating traditional resource planning. The unpredictable nature of these large, dynamic loads adds further complexity for grid operators tasked with maintaining system reliability amid rapid demand changes. Addressing these challenges requires a combination of technical and policy-driven solutions, such as demand response programs, advanced forecasting techniques, and intelligent workload orchestration. Emerging technologies now enable data centers to shift computational workloads across different times and locations, creating new opportunities to alleviate grid congestion and align demand with periods of abundant renewable energy. As this trend evolves, it is increasingly important to develop incentives for data center operators to adjust their loads in ways that not only lower operational costs and carbon emissions but also support overall grid reliability and resilience.
1:55–2:45 p.m.
Addressing the Exponential Growth of Data Centers on the Bulk Power System and lessons Learned from IBRs
Jeff Zhao, Elevate Energy Consulting
With the rapid expansion of cloud computing and emerging AI technologies, data centers are projected to grow at an estimated annual rate of 10% through 2030, becoming a significant driver of increased power demand. This exponential growth brings numerous challenges and risks to the bulk power system (BPS) that must have swift and effective mitigation implemented to prevent any significant reliability impacts of the grid, an undesirable outcome for grid operators and data center operators alike. Recent events, such as the tripping of 1.5 GW of data centers in Northern Virginia during a transmission fault, have further highlighted the critical concerns regarding system reliability and underscored the need to re-evaluate the data center interconnection process and interconnection requirements. Data centers are characterized by many properties that are quite similar to the properties of Inverter-Based Resources (IBRs): heavy penetration of power electronic equipment, rapid ramping rates, different load profiles compared to conventional loads (and generators), and large-scale exponential growth both with individual resources and in aggregation across distribution systems.
This study analyzes the risks and challenges data centers pose to BPS reliability mirroring lessons learned from IBR integration across several dimensions on both the distribution and transmission levels, including interconnection processes, modeling, planning, operations, regulations, and market dynamics. Key challenges identified include the high volume of interconnection requests, accelerated deployment timelines, insufficient operational characteristic data, power quality issues, lack of accurate and validated steady state and dynamic models of data centers, the colocation of data centers and generation resources, and energy adequacy concerns. To address these challenges, we leveraged insights from IBR development and proposed actionable risk mitigations for BPS owners, planners, operators, and regulators. Key recommendations include updating regulations and reliability standards, introducing ride-through requirements for data centers, fostering collaboration among stakeholders, streamlining interconnection processes, enhancing data center modeling, refining transmission planning study methodologies, implementing high-resolution monitoring equipment requirements for data centers, and conducting ongoing forensic event analyses following major grid disturbances involving data centers. These actions aim to standardize and accelerate the interconnection of data centers while maintaining BPS resiliency and reliability for all customers. Our findings underscore the importance of collaboration, communication, and detailed technical information sharing among all stakeholders to address interconnection challenges and safeguard BPS reliability.
2:45–3:15 p.m.
Break
3:15–4:05 p.m.
AI Processor Requirements
Ratul Das, Caiwen Ding, University of Minnesota
The rapid deployment of machine learning (ML) has witnessed various challenges such as prolonged computation and high memory footprint on systems. In this talk, we will present several ML acceleration frameworks through algorithm-hardware codesign. First, we introduce a fine-grained crossbar-based ML accelerator. Rather than mapping trained positive and negative weights post hoc, we proactively ensure that all weights within the same crossbar column share the same sign, reducing area overhead. Additionally, by dividing the crossbar into subarrays, we enable efficient input zero-bit skipping. Next, we focus on codesigning graph neural network (GNN) training. To leverage training sparsity and enhance explainable ML, we propose a hardware-friendly nonlinearity with tailored GPU kernel support. Finally, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for AI accelerator design, demonstrating their potential to automate and optimize hardware architectures for ML workloads.
4:10–5:00 p.m.
Special Studies for Large Data Center Load
Andrew Isaacs, Electranix Corporation
The rapid emergence of large data center loads has taken much of the power systems community by surprise, introducing new and significant dynamic behaviors that pose serious reliability challenges to the bulk power system. This presentation will address urgent study priorities from the viewpoint of transmission planners responsible for maintaining system reliability. Key topics include assessing potential damage to synchronous generators, managing a possible rise in harmonic disturbances across the grid, mitigating the decline in system damping, and developing new strategies for voltage control. The session will also cover system modeling categories, outlining the types of models needed for each area of concern, along with practical guidance for load-serving entities struggling to keep up with increasing data demands.
Relaying I Track
Meeting Rooms 1–3
Moderator: Dave Bisel
Co-Moderators: Pratap Mysore, John Berzins
1:00–1:50 p.m.
Applying Distance Protection to Comply with PRC-026-1 Both With and Without Implementing Power Swing Blocking
Mike Kockott, Hitachi Energy
PRC-026-1 requires that identified protection functions on the bulk electric system do not trip for stable power swings during non-fault conditions. Any distance protection element subject to the standard that has the tripping (operate) region of its characteristic not fully contained within the defined unstable power swing region (i.e., is noncompliant) requires action to be taken to meet, or become excluded from meeting, the requirements of the standard. Any noncompliant distance protection element can be excluded if it is supervised by power swing blocking. Two cases will be analyzed, one low and one high maximum load case. Applying power swing blocking has some challenges. These will be discussed. To alleviate these challenges, a solution that does not use power swing blocking will be proposed. This solution will use two distance zone elements dedicated to this solution. Three cases will be analyzed, with increasing maximum load, to demonstrate that the proposed solution will offer a viable solution to exclude non-compliant distance elements without needing them to be supervised by power swing blocking.
1:55–2:45 p.m.
Improving Safety and Reliability on High-Voltage Lines With Broken Conductor Detection: A Utility’s Perspective
Josh LaBlanc, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc.; Joe Livingston, Great River Energy
In this presentation, we use data and real-world events from Great River Energy’s and Bonneville Power Administration’s power system to analyze the impacts of broken conductors and how broken-conductor detection can be used to improve safety and reliability. This paper discusses solutions for detecting broken conductors on untapped and tapped transmission and subtransmission circuits.
2:45–3:15 p.m.
Break
3:15–4:05 p.m.
Essentials of Renewable Energy Protection and Monitoring
Dan Ransom, GE Vernova
More and more inverter-based energy resources (IBRs) are connected to the power system. Recent standards, such as IEEE 2800-2022 and NERC PRC-029-1, national grid codes, and regulations require that IBRs feeding the grid must support voltage and frequency during a network failure. The amount of controllable power reserves (active and inductive reactive power) from large-scale, conventional power plants is decreasing. Another concern with wide application of distributed renewable energy resources is maintaining reactive power support for grid voltage stability. Grid voltage stability is affected by faults, increasing load with large reactive power requirements, and automated changes within the network that can lead to power-system voltage drops. In severe cases, voltage instability might cause a power outage (blackout). A timed and count qualified phase-undervoltage (27T) element keeps the IBR operating. If voltage drops and an inductive, reactive power flow toward the IBR generating unit occurs, an undervoltage element controlled by reactive power (27Q) removes the IBR from the power system.
Recent standards and grid codes also mandate operation during frequency excursions, with primary frequency response (PFR) and fast frequency response (FFR) specified response functions. The protective relay assists with initiating these IBR plant actions via frequency (81) elements.
4:10–5:00 p.m.
Case Study: Application Considerations for Local and Remote Breaker Failure Protection from a Utility's Perspective
Yash Shah, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc.; Tyler Porter, Great River Energy; Adi Mulawarman, Xcel Energy
This presentation discusses application considerations for applying local and remote breaker failure protection and provides a case study of Xcel Energy and Great River Energy’s philosophy on applying local and remote breaker failure protection in their system.
Power Systems O&M Track
Meeting Rooms 4–6
Moderator: Greg Owen
Co-Moderators: Troy Knutson, Mark Tiemeier
1:00–1:50 p.m.
Wildfire Mitigation Strategies for Utilities
Max Majkowsk, Expedium Consulting; Dan Lysaker, AspenTech Digital Grid Management
Wildfire mitigation is a multifaceted problem and requires a number of solutions to be put in place to provide a utility with the tools and solutions necessary to combat this ever-growing risk. The impacts of wildfires for utilities and society are large and numerous, so avoidance is top of mind for many. This presentation will cover some of the strategies which utilities around the country are researching and deploying. Strategies include model-based software, sensors, AI, grid hardening, and advanced relay settings.
1:55–2:45 p.m.
A Growing Question for Distribution Utilities: Predicting Tree Growth for Vegetation Management
Rich Hauer, Eocene Environmental Group; Neil Stiller, Rochester Public Utilities
Rochester Public Utilities (RPU) is the largest municipal utility in the State of Minnesota, serving 56,000 electric customers. RPU regularly maintains trees near power lines to promote safe and reliable power delivery. To best achieve this important management outcome, a tree growth study was undertaken to better understand the potential for tree conflicts with utility lines before the next scheduled tree inspection. A project goal was to understand how trees may differ in growth patterns. Trees representing approximately 25 species were examined in the dormant season of late 2024 and early 2025. Tree regrowth as measured by elongation rates for vertical and horizontal twigs was tested for the effects of site conditions, tree attributes, past maintenance, and other factors. To estimate vegetation growth rates, multiple regression models were developed to predict annual twig elongation based on tree diameter, species, health, tree canopy dimensions, time since last pruned, pruning type (removal, heading, or reduction cut), treatment type (side prune, crown reduction, overhang, lateral shelf), and other parameters. In summary, the utility forest growth model was built upon the tree inventory parameters (e.g., tree species, tree condition, tree health) using a subset of 60 trees species with a target 15 trees within each growth cycle year (e.g., one, two, three, and four years’ growth post last pruned).
2:45–3:15 p.m.
Break
3:15–4:05 p.m.
How to Effectively Integrate Mobile Online DGA Systems to Improve Operations
Colby Morris, Xcel Energy; Jack Nicholson, Vaisala
Xcel Energy, like most utilities, uses time-based oil sampling to generate risk profiles and identify problematic transformers. The issue is how to address these questionable transformers when offline testing methods are inconclusive and repeated manual tests are too burdensome. Xcel Energy has integrated mobile online DGA monitoring devices into their maintenance protocols as a solution. These monitoring systems are easy to deploy and provide real-time gassing data for analysis and actionable data to confidently develop strategies for maintenance and avoid outages. This presentation will also drill down into a specific case.
4:10–5:00 p.m.
Rural Reliability: Identification and Mitigation of Service Impacts
Evan Edwards, Brenden LaHaise, Minnkota Power Cooperative, Inc.
Minnkota Power Cooperative, at the direction of membership, has been working since the early 2010s to better understand and mitigate momentary and sustained outages of distribution substations, primarily fed from a mostly unshielded, radial 69 kV system. This presentation looks at Minnkota's methodology for identification and mitigation of outage issues and the outcomes of those mitigations.