Working to transform power grid
GE employee leads a team at tail-end of a project to create an improved transformer
When Ibrahima Ndiaye wakes up at 5:30 in the morning, his mind almost immediately runs off thinking about what he has planned for the day.
Will he be meeting with customers? Maybe he’ll be going to Mississippi to test out a new-age transformer he helped build. Or perhaps he’ll spend the day signing time sheets, running calculations and simulating the power of a three-story wind turbine in a small lab without blowing the roof off the place.
All these things are part of a day in the life of an electric systems technology manager at General Electric.
But there’s some irony to all of this.
Just nine years ago, when a former colleague suggested Ndiaye interview with GE for a position in his engineering specialty, he was a tad confused. “GE who?” he said. Despite a hesitation to move away from Canada, the Senegal native figured it couldn’t hurt his prospects and seized the opportunity. When it came time to interview in person, Ndiaye missed his evening flight the night before and no other planes were heading out that way.
It was about 5 p.m. and his interview was at 8 a.m. He contemplated going back home and just calling the company to see what could be done. Mid-debate, he decided to pick up his car keys and just drive.
Nine hours later around 2 a.m., an exhausted Ndiaye arrived at his hotel. His interview presentation was incomplete and he had just a few hours to finish it. He closed his eyes a couple of hours later, then hustled to meet his future employers.
While having dinner with a hiring manager later that evening, he learned his efforts weren’t for nothing. In a rare occurance (because GE doesn’t typically make same-day offers), the hiring manager presented him with an offer on the spot, he said. Ndiaye told them he would think about it, although on the inside he already knew he would accept it.
Now nine years later, he is a senior engineer leading a team of innovative brains toward reshaping the future of the power grid.
Today’s power grid isn’t flexible, Ndiaye explained. Transformers — machines that process electricity so it can reach buildings and homes — are limited in their capacities, life span and adaptation.
If one transformer fails, you need to quickly replace it with the exact same model. Otherwise, the entire grid is endan
gered, according to Ndiaye. And the replacement can take anywhere from 18 to 36 months in many cases.
“With a country like the U.S., almost 100 percent based on electrical energy, losing power of the grid is very critical,” he said. “We cannot afford (to be) losing many lines.”
To solve the problem, Ndiaye and his team spent the last six years building that can conform to grid conditions as they change. They are working on this with the U.S. Department of Energy.
They’ve run a series of tests, analyses and simulations until they could prove their ideas made sense. From there, they physically built a prototype and scaled it to size. On days when Ndiaye felt stuck, he would head into their wire-filled lab to toy with parts until something clicked.
He and his team are finally at the project’s tail-end. The transformer successfully passed a critical field validation test this month and should be moving to commercialization come March.
Jim LeBlanc, GE’s technology director for electrical systems, acknowledged six years seems like a long time for one project but that’s what it takes going through the GE lifecycle and to bring a theory to life for the sake of making a “difference in the world,” which his team believes this transformer can do.
Bringing such innovations to fruition hasn’t been a walk in the park either; oftentimes the team hit roadblocks. Some days mother nature didn’t want to cooperate and they had to deal with the laws of physics. Other days, it was tough to find the right partners and resources to advance the project, LeBlanc explained.
In the case of the transformer, finding a utility partner to test out their prototype was a challenge.
That too, they overcame and Ndiaye was essential to finding or inspiring solutions.
“It’s just very genuine in how he approaches that role leading by example,” LeBlanc said.
“I just point to his (Ndiaye’s) ability to both understand the big picture and how some of these pieces fit together to make an impact, as well as being well involved with the details and inventing very nuanced but critical parts of the technology as as he moves through the programs and projects that he’s involved in,” he added.
Going forward, Ndiaye says his team, in its Edison-like fashion, rather than move onto another project, will try to tackle another obstacle impacting grid power: transformers’ life span. Transformers have a shelf life of about 40 years. They want to extend transformers’ lives to 80 years or longer.
“Innovation doesn’t work if it is not solving a problem. It’s kind of applying what Edison mirrored,” he said.
“Your success is not what you believe is good or great. Your success is what the other thing is ... if the customer thinks this is great. I’m considering what people need and proceed to invent it,” he said.