Interview with Marianna Vaiman, CEO, V&R Energy

The power grid is transforming faster than the workforce can keep up — and the solution isn’t just hiring more engineers. It’s giving the ones we have the tools to see blackouts coming before they happen.

At the CIGRE 2023 Grid of the Future Symposium, Marianna Vaiman, CEO of V&R Energy, sits down with Alan Ross to explain how real-time data, cascading outage prevention, and automated decision-making are reshaping the way utilities protect the grid.

Marianna’s path into power systems engineering began at home — her father was a power systems engineer — and she now leads a company building the very tools that help operators keep the lights on. From SCADA data and state estimator analytics to synchrophasor-based situational awareness, this conversation maps the biggest threats to grid stability and the technology designed to stop them.

• The two major phenomena driving blackouts: voltage instability/collapse and cascading outages
• How V&R Energy’s online cascading analysis tool is deployed at ISO New England for real-time operator decisions
• Why inverter-based resources (IBR) and DERs make the grid more stochastic and less predictable
• The brain drain crisis: why two unqualified workers can’t replace one qualified engineer
• How SCADA data and state estimator data feed automated decision-making systems
• The blurring line between transmission and distribution, and why reverse flows change everything
• Synchrophasor technology and point-on-wave applications for real-time situational awareness
• CIGRE’s role as a global knowledge-sharing forum across national committees

Guest: Marianna Vaiman, CEO, V&R Energy
Host: Alan Ross
Event: CIGRE Grid of the Future Symposium, 2023