Company type | Private/employee-owned |
---|---|
Industry | Electrical equipment |
Founded | 1982 |
Founder | Edmund O. Schweitzer III |
Headquarters | |
Products | Power system protection & control, fault indicators, electrical enclosures |
Services | Power management Protection and automation services Cybersecurity analysis |
Number of employees | 5,000+ |
Website | selinc |
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc. (SEL) designs, manufactures, and supports products and services ranging from generator and transmission protection to distribution automation and control systems. Founded in 1982 by Edmund O. Schweitzer III, SEL shipped the world's first digital protective relay. [1] Presently, the company designs and manufactures embedded system products for protecting, monitoring, control, and metering of electric power systems.
The company serves a variety of industries, including utilities, pulp and paper, transportation, water and wastewater, education, healthcare, government, mission-critical facilities, and oil, gas, and petrochemical operations. [2]
SEL is 100 percent employee owned, headquartered in Pullman, Washington, with about 2,300 based there in addition to 2,700 employees in field offices and other manufacturing facilities in about 60 national locations, in addition to another 50 international.
SEL was founded in Pullman, Washington in 1982 when Dr. Edmund O. Schweitzer III invented and marketed the first all-digital protective relay.
Schweitzer created the relay as a Ph.D. project while at Washington State University. He sold his first product, the SEL-21, to Otter Tail Power Company in Fergus Falls, Minnesota in 1984. Otter Tail initially used the SEL-21 for its fault location and event recording functions. SEL uses OTTER and TAIL as default passwords for their relays as an homage to their very first customer.
In 1985, SEL built its first building and employed eleven people. In 2009, SEL became 100% employee-owned under an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP).
SEL has five manufacturing facilities in the U.S. located in Pullman, Washington; Moscow Idaho; Lewiston, Idaho; Lake Zurich, Illinois, and West Lafayette, Indiana. In 2003, the company opened its first Regional Integration Center in San Luis Potosí, followed by May 2017 opening in Saudi Arabia city of Dammam with a peak manufacturing ability for 1,200 control panels. With Mexico to build complete panels and PowerMAX for all of North America. The components for the panels are made in Pullman and shipped to Mexico, where they are integrated into panels.
E. O. Schweitzer Manufacturing, a manufacturer of fault indicators and sensors started by Edmund O. Schweitzer, Jr. in 1949, became a division of SEL in 2005.
SEL designs, manufactures and supports products for protection, monitoring, control, automation, and metering of electric power systems, ranging from comprehensive generator and transmission protection to distribution automation and control systems. [3]
SEL is headquartered in Pullman, Washington. [4] As of December 2016, it had operations in 24 countries and 4,600 employees worldwide. And has sold products and services in roughly 148 countries at that time.
The company operates five manufacturing facilities in the U.S. located in Pullman, Washington, Moscow, Idaho, Lewiston, Idaho, Lake Zurich, Illinois, and West Lafayette, Indiana; with additional Regional Integration Centers located in Charlotte, NC, USA with expansion project in (2017). With International integration centers in San Luis Potosí, Mexico (2003), Campinas, Brazil; Bogota, Colombia; and Khobar, Dammam Saudi Arabia (May 2017). [5]
In 2010, SEL published its first textbook, Modern Solutions for Protection, Control, and Monitoring of Electric Power Systems. SEL's quarterly Journal of Reliable Power also began in 2010.
The company's other published works include: Line Current Differential Protection: A Collection of Technical Papers Representing Modern Solutions, edited by Héctor J. Altuve Ferrer, Bogdan Kasztenny, and Normann Fischer; Analyzing and Applying Current Transformers, by Stanley Zocholl; and AC Motor Protection, by Stanley Zocholl. [6]
Additionally, hundreds of technical papers, white papers, application notes, and case studies authored by SEL employees are published on the company website. [7]
2012: Fortune's 100 Best Companies To Work For (SEL ranked #97) [8]
2013: American Red Cross Inland Northwest Chapter 2012-2013 International and National Relief Award[ citation needed ]
2014: Association of Washington Business 2014 Better Workplace Award [9] [ better source needed ]
2015: Fortune's 15 Best Workplaces in Manufacturing and Production [10]
2015: United States Energy Association 2015 USEA Corporate Volunteer Award [11] [ non-primary source needed ]
2016: Fortune's 15 Best Workplaces in Manufacturing and Production [12]
2016: Fortune's 100 Best Workplaces for Millennials[ citation needed ]
2016: Fortune's 20 Best Workplaces for Baby Boomers[ citation needed ]
2016: Palouse Knowledge Corridor Entrepreneur of the Palouse Award [13]
For more than a decade, North American electric utilities have ranked SEL as the #1 relay manufacturer in the Newton-Evans Worldwide Study of the Protective Relay Marketplace in Electric Utilities. [14]
Whitman County is a county located in the U.S. state of Washington. As of the 2020 census, the population was 47,973. The county seat is Colfax, and its largest city is Pullman.
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Edmund O. Schweitzer III is an electrical engineer, inventor, and founder of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL). Schweitzer launched SEL in 1982 in Pullman, Washington. Today, SEL manufacturers a wide variety of products that protect the electric power grid and industrial control systems at its five state-of-the-art U.S. manufacturing facilities in Pullman, Washington; Lewiston, Idaho; Lake Zurich, Illinois; West Lafayette, Indiana, and; Moscow, Idaho. SEL products and technologies are used in virtually every substation in North America and are in operation in 164 countries.
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In utility and industrial electric power transmission and distribution systems, a numerical relay is a computer-based system with software-based protection algorithms for the detection of electrical faults. Such relays are also termed as microprocessor type protective relays. They are functional replacements for electro-mechanical protective relays and may include many protection functions in one unit, as well as providing metering, communication, and self-test functions.
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Jonathan Sykes is an Engineering Services Manager at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sykes graduated from the University of Arizona in 1982 and since that time has worked in electric power industry at System Protection and Test and at Pacific Gas and Electric Company in San Francisco, California, where he also served as senior manager. During the 1990s, he was with RTU/SCADA systems in Arizona and in 2000 became an inventor of IEC 61850 Generic Object Oriented Substation Events messaging. In 2019, Sykes became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has served as secretary of the IEEE Power and Energy Society.