Richard Brown 2

Dr. Richard Brown is the practice director for Exponent’s Engineering Management Consulting practice. He is an internationally recognized expert in infrastructure asset management, power system reliability, major event performance, system hardening, reliability improvement, power delivery system planning, smart grid, system automation, distributed energy resources, risk assessment, and economic analysis. He has submitted expert witness testimony to regulatory commissions in the states of California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts and Texas. He has developed several generations of distribution system reliability assessment software tools, and has helped a large number of utilities to develop cost-justified reliability improvement plans, including expert witness testimony for rate cases.

Richard has extensive experience with extreme weather events including hurricanes, linear winds, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes, floods, ice storms and winter storms. This includes post-event analyses to examine utility infrastructure performance, restoration performance, and storm cost recovery support. Dr. Brown is also one of the early pioneers in transmission and distribution system hardening against major weather events, and has helped several major utilities develop and implement infrastructure hardening programs. He led a consortium of Florida utilities under the direction of the Florida Public Utilities Commission do develop a probabilistic storm and restoration simulation to quantify the costs and benefits of hardening options. Richard was also retained by the Public Utilities Commission of Texas to quantify the costs and benefits of proposed system hardening legislation, and to recommend best practices.

Dr. Brown has extensive experience in electric system outage investigations including major urban interruption events in cities including Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, Vancouver B.C., and Denver. He has also provided expert witness testimony for utilities facing civil actions after accidents involving electric utility system infrastructure.

Prior to Exponent, Richard held executive positions at ABB, KEMA, Quanta Technology and WorleyParsons. He has published more than 90 technical papers, has taught courses in 11 countries, and is author of the books Electric Power Distribution Reliability and Business Essentials for Utility Engineers. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a registered professional engineer.