Patrick has more than 30 years experience in the power industry where he has primarily specialised in power systems protection, network modelling, load flow, fault, arc flash and CT specifications and transient analysis studies. His experience ranges from LV network design and protection to EHV applications.

The first 10 years of Patrick’s career were spent with Eskom, South Africa’s national utility. As a Senior Engineer Protection Technology with Eskom, he initiated the North East Region Protection Conference, as well as organising monthly tutorial sessions for the protection fraternity in his region.

After moving to Australia in 2003, Patrick spent 6 years with L K Technical, a consultancy based in Newcastle, New South Wales. There he was involved in many projects in the chemical industry, mining, utility and power station arena amongst others.

Patrick relocated to Brisbane where in 2010 he founded Powercrest. Under the Powercrest banner he was involved in a diverse range of projects ranging from the oil and gas industry to solar generation, to owner’s engineer for a large base load power station for their generator protection refurbishment initiatives.

Patrick has done much work in transmission line modelling and has written his own Excel based spreadsheet that determines the sequence impedances for a transmission line given the conductor type, tower configuration and soil resistivity.

Throughout his career he has always had a keen interest in training and has presented protection and power systems training courses in the UK, Singapore, Nigeria, the Caribean, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. Whilst with L K Technical Patrick has presented numerous training courses in PowerTools for Windows, a popular engineering analysis tool. He has also authored several training courses and has authored and presented technical papers and seminars on protective relaying other power systems engineering subjects.

Patrick is a Registered Professional Engineer (RPEQ) with the Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland, a member of Engineers Australia and IEEE as well as a Senior Member of the South African Institute of Engineers.