Patrick Shell

I build systems and solutions solving challenges in the power industry. Twenty-eight years, leading teams across a vertically integrated utility including environmental, engineering, regulatory, operations, IT & OT systems, project and program management.

A consistent approach: identify the opportunities and problems, define the business case to justify and commit to a solution, build the project and team to implement the solution, and ensure a smooth transition to operations.

The business results: a byproduct disposal liability turned into a twenty-year venture on the partner's capital, a swing of roughly $10–12M a year. An OEM service agreement cut by roughly $25M a year after building the competitive alternative the negotiation lacked. More than $100M of internal capital won for programs improving safety, compliance, reliability and efficiency.

Developed a 55-person asset management program optimizing $15B of assets and institutionalized in the operating units today with Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM).

My career began on the other side of the table: as the county regulator who built the Clean Air Act case that became the first settlement in EPA's national enforcement initiative against coal-fired power plants, then recruited by the utility the case was built against to create a negotiated path forward. Trained in the U.S. Navy nuclear power program, I have consistently leveraged my Navy operations mindset and lifelong learning, earning an MBA, MIT Systems Certification, ASQ Black Belt and SMRP CMRP.

TAMPA ELECTRIC — Tampa, Florida 1998 – Present

Senior Director, Special Projects — Business Transformation 2026 – Present

Chartered to transform the performance of the enterprise governance model and ERP system configuration for more than $1.6B a year of capital and O&M. Improve how work is approved, planned, contracted, paid and reported coordinating through six functions that do not report to the role: operations, supply chain, legal, finance, audit and technology.

• Built the control-reliance case that will retire more than 12,000 duplicate approvals a year with no control removed: the same approvers were re-approving downstream a commitment already approved upstream. Approved by internal audit, the controller and legal; implementation under way.
• Designed a canonical data model for the budget-to-pay chain across six systems of record, linked by resolving the keys each system already keeps rather than centralizing the data, with agentic analysis in place of expensive ELT and data-lake builds so a dollar can be followed from budget to payment and no owner gives up a system.

Senior Director, Asset Management 2020 – 2026

Designed and implemented enterprise asset management from four operating organizations consolidated into one 55-person function organized by asset class and led through four managers managing $15B+ in assets, $1B a year of capital, $600M of O&M: 6.1 GW of generation (NGCC, 25 solar sites, battery, reciprocating engines, and aeroderivative), 250 substations, 1,300 circuit-miles of transmission, 13,000 of distribution.

• Moved the portfolio from reactive and preventive operations to a proactive, predictive risk framework built on reliability-centered maintenance and modeled on ISO 55001: every critical asset carries named failure mechanisms scored on criticality against health for 50+ asset classes, 20,000+ failure mechanisms. Program validated by internal audit, insurer review and operating results.
• Wrote the fleet root-cause program with numeric triggers. Its repeat-event trigger escalated five load-tap-changer failures in a year as one mechanism rather than five events; a fleet-wide baseline inspection completed in eight months found seven more units degraded and set a five-year inspection cycle.
• Directed the fleet PRC-005 protection-system study (2022): 521 recommendations, 17 findings self-reported before the audit letter, 227 potential violations avoided, and a NERC audit with no findings. Then brought power-system analysis in-house (2025): ride-through coordination and facility ratings across 19 solar sites at ~$1.05M of avoided external cost and secured a DOE-funded digital-twin research partnership on the 25-site, 1,366 MW solar fleet.
• Originated and won funding for a twenty-year grid remote-sensing and AI program after piloting the field work personally: forty worst-performing circuits patrolled from the ground and by drone, the same engineers reviewing both drone imagery found 655 pole defects to the ground patrol's 144 with a business case of $85–106M a year.
• Built the team across disciplines and the programs outlived the reporting line: the registry, operator rounds, hazardous-energy control, change-control and root-cause programs run in the operating units today; MacDill Power Station, commissioned with integrated equipment tagging and asset registry. Six of the function's people moved into manager roles and two into director roles; the successor rose inside the department to Senior Director.

Manager, Asset Management 2016 – 2020

The origins of TEC’s first asset management program: one station, four people, organized around asset classes rather than departments, with fleet accountability for NERC's cybersecurity and operations-and-planning standards and hands on RCM builds.

• Built management of change into the work management system in 2019 as a workflow rather than a form — every change carries an owner, approvals and its triggering work order. Codified as the fleet standard in 2021; still the change-control path.

Manager, Operational Technology 2010 – 2016

Integrating plant control systems and the enterprise: work management, electronic isolation, alarm management, the process historian, control-network security and the data chain that keeps construction on budget.

• With little leverage in the OEM's full-wrap service agreement on seven combustion turbines, built a third-party alternative covering all critical parts, priced by an owner's cost-of-service model, then renegotiated in 2013, cutting service cost roughly $25M a year, with availability in the top 20% of that turbine's worldwide fleet.
• Pending NERC CIP-002 criteria would have put a 1.8 GW site into the Medium Impact tier costing roughly $7M of compliance capital plus $3M a year in O&M.

Engineered the classification out: a planned control-system upgrade merged with network segmentation as one program in one outage window, for $2.3M. Three audits since have upheld it.

• Represented Energy Supply on the company's first modern ERP, identified during blueprinting that the configured program would break the budget-to-commitment-to-actual chain, and led the team that architected around it and restored the chain after go-live.

Manager, Operations Planning and Generation Planning 2004 – 2010

Lead the team executing analytics for what the company ran each day and what it built, bought or declined. Built the first operations planning function, then lead integrated resource planning: the Ten-Year Site Plan, IRP, purchased-power evaluations, and fuel budgeting.

• Ran the dispatch and portfolio-optimization modeling behind twenty-plus resource decisions, including declining to build a planned IGCC unit on an escalating estimate, and conducted the 730 MW capacity RFP ahead of 800+ MW of expiring purchased power: 59 proposals, 2,900+ MW evaluated.
• Converted a disposal liability into a twenty-year venture: when consent-decree ammonia made the fly ash unsaleable, invoked force majeure and ran an RFP, valued the deal as a Monte Carlo range, estimated the bidders' P&Ls to shape the negotiation, and kept a third bidder alive as leverage until testing disproved the objection that had ranked it third. Capital, indemnity and performance risk on the partner; returns to Tampa Electric.

• MBA · MS Environmental Engineering, University of South Florida · BS Microbiology, University of Florida · MIT Certificate, Architecture and Systems Engineering
• Licensed Professional Engineer, Florida · Former ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt · Former SMRP CMRP