Welcome Your New Expert Interview Series: Kyle Thomas, New Expert in the Clean Power Group – [an Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Expert Interview]

In this Energy Central Power Perspectives Expert Interview, we welcome Kyle as a member of our Energy Central Network of Experts (in the Clean Power Group) and explore his perspective on how utilities and developers can leverage industry collaboration, adopt emerging standards more quickly, and turn today’s grid challenges into opportunities for long-term innovation and reliability.

Matt Chester: Welcome to the Network of Experts, and to Energy Central. Let’s start with you introducing yourself broadly to our community. What do you do in the power industry and what are your particular areas of interest and experience?

Kyle Thomas:  I’m the Vice President of Engineering & Compliance Services at Elevate Energy Consulting. While our firm is somewhat new to the scene, our team brings deep-rooted industry experience. We’re a group of engineers passionate about diving into technical challenges, especially during this time of rapid transformation in the energy space.

Our focus spans several evolving areas of the power industry, from renewable integration to the impact of emerging large loads like data centers. We specialize in how these trends are reshaping the grid, particularly how utility business practices, engineering design, and planning and operations need to adapt to these monumental changes.

Before Elevate, I spent the bulk of my career at Dominion Energy, where I began as an electrical engineer working in protection and control. Over time, I held various engineering and leadership roles that allowed me to develop a deep interest in grid monitoring and data analytics. That includes technologies like synchrophasors, digital fault recorders, and fault analysis tools that help us understand what’s really happening on the grid, both in real time and immediately following grid events and disturbances.

I’ve also worked extensively with the engineering models and simulation tools we use to plan and operate the system under a wide range of scenarios. Those experiences now inform much of the work I do at Elevate.

One unique passion of mine is regulatory compliance. I’m one of those engineers who genuinely enjoys working with NERC standards, FERC orders, and the complex technical regulations that shape our industry. As these standards necessarily grow more intricate with the evolution of the grid, it’s rewarding to bridge the gap between technical engineering practices and compliance requirements—ensuring we not only meet the letter of the law but do so in a way that reflects engineering best practices.

MC: With the increasing integration of renewable resources into the grid, what do you see as the biggest opportunities and obstacles for utilities in terms of maintaining reliability and compliance?

KT: This is something we’re working on every day—and really, the industry has been learning how to integrate renewable resources into the grid for well over a decade now. The interconnection queue is currently over 95% renewables, and we’ve already connected a significant number of these resources with many more on the way.

One of the key challenges and opportunities lies in the fundamental technology used by these new generation resources: power electronic converters. Unlike our traditional synchronous generators—those large spinning machines that have been the backbone of our grid for a century—inverter-based resources operate through control logic and software in the inverters. That shift creates both complexity and potential.

The opportunity is that the inverters in these new resources can react almost instantaneously to changes in grid conditions. With the right programming, they can replicate many of the services synchronous generators provide—like voltage and frequency support—and even offer new capabilities we haven’t fully explored yet.

That said, we’re still collectively in the early stages of understanding what a grid dominated by inverter-based resources should look like and how to operate it under all types of system conditions and disturbances. This creates significant obstacles. In some areas today, we already see moments when over 90% of the generation online is inverter-based. Even where traditional synchronous generation is still present under those conditions, we’re operating in a transition phase, and that raises questions: How should these new resources behave during grid disturbances? Are they programmed correctly to deliver the right response? And are our models accurately representing how they perform? So much incredible research and work across the globe has been done to help answer these questions. While we still have questions and the work continues, we’re at a stage now where the implementation of solutions is underway in our regulations, policies, technical requirements, and operational practices. The continued exponential growth of these resources, however, pushes us all to move faster and faster to maintain reliability and resiliency while our system changes.

MC: Innovation plays a crucial role in the energy sector. Can you highlight any recent innovative clean energy technologies or approaches that you find particularly promising?

KT: One of the most promising innovations we’re seeing—especially with inverter-based resources—is the emergence of grid forming inverters. Traditionally, most inverter-connected resources have been what we call grid-following. That means they depend on the existing grid voltage to synchronize and operate. But when the grid becomes unstable, so do those grid-following devices.

Grid forming inverters flip that model. They establish their own voltage reference, allowing them to operate independently and even support the grid during disturbances. It’s a control strategy that starts to mimic certain aspects of synchronous generators. We’re seeing these technologies being deployed in high-renewables regions like Australia and Hawaii, where they’ve become essential to maintaining grid stability. But there are other places across the U.S. taking note and starting to explore grid forming requirements for their systems to prepare for the future.

The exciting part is that grid forming technology is available today. We’ve conducted studies showing you can safely deploy it even in systems still dominated by synchronous generation—and in fact, it enhanced stability in those regions. So, there’s a real opportunity to future-proof the grid by incorporating these technologies now and gaining operational familiarity before the system becomes even more inverter-dominant.

MC: Your involvement in industry organizations like CIGRE, TRUC, and IEEE speaks to your commitment to staying at the forefront of industry developments. How do these memberships inform your work at Elevate Energy Consulting?

KT: I’ve been fortunate to have been introduced and involved with organizations like CIGRE, TRUC, and IEEE since the beginning of my career (even before my career while in grad school), working on technical challenging and innovative projects with teams across the world. That involvement has been invaluable for my development as an engineer. These forums bring together professionals at all stages of their careers—from peers and junior engineers to industry veterans and mentors—creating a powerful space for knowledge exchange.

These organizations convene the right stakeholders around key technical topics, whether it’s advancing research, developing standards, or figuring out how to adopt emerging technologies. A great example is the IEEE 2800-2022 standard for inverter-based resources. That standard was developed by a tremendous number of industry experts, working to address core issues and concerns the industry was experiencing and continues to see today. That kind of collaboration, technical work, and industry exposure is incredibly helpful when looking at what’s coming in the future and how to prepare for it.

Involvement in these groups also broadens your perspective. When you’re working within a single utility or company, you might only see one side of an issue. But these industry forums provide access to a global view—how utilities in Australia or Europe or anywhere in the world are tackling the same challenges, maybe with solutions we can adopt here in the U.S. much more quickly because of those shared insights. This is inherent to our industry, as these values of collaboration and technical problem solving are the very reason many of these organizations were developed in the first place. This industry involvement really informs and strengthens the work we do at Elevate Energy Consulting by grounding it in the latest real-world developments across the industry.

MC: What drew you to get involved in the Energy Central community, and what value do you hope to bring your peers on the platform?

KT: I was drawn to the Energy Central community because of how many respected industry colleagues I’ve seen get involved over the years—it’s really impressive. What stood out to me is the unique format of the platform. Setting itself apart from other industry organizations, Energy Central encourages a more open, forum-style engagement across a wide range of topics. That creates a great space not only to share insights, but also to learn about areas outside my usual focus.

It’s also a powerful way to discover who the real experts are in specific domains. If I ever need a reference point or have a technical question, this community offers a way to directly connect to the right people. At the same time, it provides a platform for us at Elevate Energy Consulting to share our experiences on timely topics—like inverter-based resource integration, protection and control systems, or data centers and large load integration. We’re eager to contribute by sharing both what’s worked for us and what hasn’t.

MC: What’s your final message you’d share with our utility leader readers?

KT: The renewable integration journey has taught us a lot about industry collaboration, setting performance standards, and sharing models and data. We’re still navigating that space, but we’ve made tremendous progress. Now, we’re entering—or perhaps already well into—the cusp of another transformational wave: the massive growth in data centers and other new large-scale electrified loads.

This new growth is incredibly exciting for the industry. It represents opportunity, innovation, and long-term demand—but also brings challenges that are strikingly similar to what we faced with inverter-based resources. Questions around grid capacities, performance expectations, modeling, and data-sharing are all coming up again.

The good news? We’ve done this before. We’ve built playbooks, written papers, expanded and hardened our infrastructure, and mitigated technical problems. My hope is that we can move even faster this time, leveraging the lessons from renewable integration to meet the urgency and scale demanded by this next wave. I look forward to being a part of that evolution alongside this community and watching how our industry continues to rise to the occasion.

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Thanks to Kyle for joining me for this interview and providing a wealth of insights and expertise to the Energy Central Community. You can trust that Kyle will be available for you to reach out and connect and ask questions as an Energy Central member, so be sure to make him feel welcome when you see him across the platform.

Other expert interviews in this series can be read here, and if you are interested in becoming an expert, you can reach out to me or  apply here.