Speakers

Heidemarie (Heide) C Caswell, P.E. is the Administrator-Safety, Reliability and Security at the Oregon Public Utilities Commission.  She has been involved in the utility business during and after receiving her Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering at the University of Washington and is licensed in the state of Washington.  She’s worked at Washington Natural Gas, Puget Sound Energy and then PacifiCorp, before transitioning to the OPUC in 2022.  Her roles have been primarily utility planning, for gas and electric systems and then transitioning to reliability analysis, reporting, planning, technology and process development for reliability improvement, and then augmented with wildfire/risk quantification and mitigation and distribution system planning. She has been deeply involved in the Distribution Reliability Working Group over the last 20+ years, including facilitating the annual benchmark study the DRWG performs.  She’s led a number of task forces including Catastrophic Event Analysis and Data Analysis. She also has been a primary contributor to a number of standards related to reliability.  She has authored a number of papers related to reliability analysis.  She was awarded IEEE's Excellence in Power Distribution Engineering in 2023.  She holds chair position in IEEE PES’ Distribution Reliability Working Group and also chairs NERC’s Performance Analysis Subcommittee.