Collaborative. Multi-Disciplinary. Experts.

After many years working at Public Service Company of Colorado (now Xcel Energy), John Nelson left to fulfill a lifelong dream of building a team-member and client-focused electrical design firm offering services to utilities and industrial clients. He originally incorporated under the name ‘Phased Right, Inc.’, but later began doing business as the Nelson Electric Incorporated or the NEI Electric Power Engineering, Inc. of today.

Although designed in the 1980’s, microprocessor relays were not widely adopted until the early 1990’s. A decade into business, NEI’s growing staff of protection engineers were now spending around half their time in the field testing, troubleshooting, and repairing relay installations. Several customers also requested NEI replace their electromechanical relays with microprocessor-based ones. NEI’s engineers were at the forefront of designing, programming, installing, and commissioning this new piece of technology.

While NEI’s engineers had begun experimenting with 3D design tools, 2011 marked the first large-scale project NEI designed in 3D. This emerging piece of technology better aligned the designs of various design firms and allowed the client to walk through their future facility prior to a single shovel of dirt being moved. Since this milestone, NEI continues to support innovative design tools and methodologies including 3D and BIM.

In 2014, after offering RTU and SCADA engineering to clients for over a decade, NEI committed and developed a dedicated team for this burgeoning services vertical. The SCADA team immediately assumed the existing substation RTU work and also expanded into industrial automation, power plant controls, networking, and cybersecurity. With the interconnectedness of facilities and devices, NEI’s SCADA team is involved in nearly every project from design to on-site integration, giving our clients full visibility and control over their facilities.

Even before the global pandemic, NEI saw a shifting trend in the workforce, and team members were asking for more flexibility in where and when they worked. As a result, NEI invested heavily in necessary technology and quality control processes to make the change to hybrid and distributed teams possible. While originally expecting the shift to distributed work to take years, the pandemic forced this change and NEI was ready and hasn’t looked back. Today, around half our staff reports to the Lakewood headquarters, and half does not, giving every team member the option to define the work location that best suits them.