Top Innovators
Lesia Bilitchenko is a Grid Mod Leader at Southern California Edison. Lawrence Yonathan is a Senior Engineer at Southern California Edison. Jerome Marr is Senior Manager of IT at Southern California Edison. Chandra Gosai is Senior Project Manager at Southern California Edison. Lawrence Yonathan is the main point of contact on the business side of SPEED. John Lee is the solution architect for SPEED. Lesia Bilitchenko is the former Senior Manager of the System Planning Tools team at Southern California Edison.
Southern California Edison won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Francis Upton Top Innovator in Analytics for Utility Service'' for its SPEED - System Planning Evaluation and Execution Dashboard.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Describe the innovation and its positive impact.
Lesia Bilitchenko: SPEED, or System Planning Evaluation and Execution Dashboard, is a transformational business tool, because it changes how we do grid investment and planning. It revolutionizes electric system planning and forecasting through automation, large-scale advanced data utilization, and enhanced digital twin modeling
It's hard to forecast how much load there will be. It's an art and not a science, and the SPEED tool allows us to simulate the future quickly.
There are lots of data points and scenarios to consider. We aim to identify the least regrettable investments that allow us to meet all the forecasted increased demand while optimizing all our energy resources. It's so we can meet the future while keeping our rates affordable.
The tool allows us to run fast-paced data simulations to understand where the constraints on the system will be so we can make data- and risk-driven investment decisions. That's a high-level concept of the SPEED tool.