Oral-History:William Tinney
About William Tinney
Born on 5 May 1921, IEEE Life Fellow, William F. (Bill) Tinney, an innovator of modern computer analysis for power grids, died in Portland, Oregon on 14 April 2019. Widely regarded as the father of modern computer solutions for electric power networks, Tinney was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 1976, “for contributions to the application of digital computers to solve large power network problems.”
In 1943, after two years of studying electrical engineering at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Tinney enlisted in the U.S. Army and became a radar officer, with training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After serving, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Stanford University, California. He worked at the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), Portland, Oregon, from 1950 to 1979 and performed his groundbreaking work in the systems analysis section. After he retired from the BPA, he became an independent consultant to vendors of power systems software.
Tinney’s seminal 1967 paper, “Direct Solutions of Sparse Network Equations by Optimally Ordered Triangular Factorization,” coauthored with John W. Walker and published in Proceedings of the IEEE, revolutionized the solution of electric power systems via the novel exploitation of network matrix sparsity. Two other influential publications are Tinney and Clifford E. Hart’s 1967 paper “Power Flow Solution by Newton’s Method” and Hermann W. Dommel and Tinney’s 1968 paper “Optimal Power Flow Solutions,” both published in IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems.
He received many honors and awards, including the IEEE Third Millenium Award, the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Charles Concordia Power Systems Engineering Award (2004); and In 2011, he received the IEEE Medal in Power Engineering "For leadership in the technology upon which the modern computer analysis of electric power system networks is based." He was an independent consultant for vendors of power systems software. Other honors and awards include election to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering; a gold medal from the U.S. Department of the Interior (1975); and the Order of the Sacred Treasure of Japan (1990).
About the Interview
WILLIAM TINNEY: An Interview Conducted by Carson Taylor, IEEE History Center, 28 July 2015
Interview #754 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
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William Tinney, an oral history conducted in 2015 by Carson Taylor, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: William Tinney
INTERVIEWER: Carson Taylor
DATE: 28 July 2015
PLACE: Portland, Oregon
Taylor:
This is the 28th of July 2015. An interview with William F. Tinney at his home in Portland, Oregon. Mr. Tinney, Bill, you were born on May 5, 1921, in Portland and grew up in Portland. Please start by telling us about your parents and what they did for a living. Did you have brothers and sisters?
Tinney:
Well, let’s see. I had a younger brother, four years younger than I am, and he is deceased already now. He is gone. My parents both went through elementary school, but that is as much education as they had. My mother was in a country school, and I don’t know too many details about that. My father was in a small town in Michigan; whatever it was he didn’t learn very much there either. So, there weren’t any books or anything in my home until I started [school]. When I started in the first grade, I was six years old, and I didn’t know ABC or 123 or any of those things. As they started the - - kids that came from immigrant families, but I worked my way out of that and did okay later. Caught up. Yes.
Taylor:
Thank you. In your early life, did you develop an interest in science and technology?
Tinney:
Yes, I certainly did, here, right here. Okay. Yes. I did develop an interest in science and technology, and I really didn’t distinguish much between them, and I knew by the time I was nine years old. I used to walk from my home at East 31st Street all the way downtown. My parents didn’t even say be careful or anything, it was just assumed. Things were so much less complicated in those days there. But I knew all about the solar system and the planets and everything by the time I was nine years old, and I had an experience that others have related about. I asked for a book on the stars, and of course, they got me the movie Stars. I know Carl Sagan just talked about that, too. No, I got the real stuff, but I was always getting the stuff that was called popular. Pretty soon I learned that the popular stuff was not for me, but at first, I would get the popular stuff. I gradually realized that when I saw the word popular that it wasn’t the stuff, but it was quite a bit later. Yes.
Taylor:
You were twenty years old when the United States entered World War II. Were you in college then and what did you do during the war?
Tinney:
I was in college then. I had got in two years at Oregon State, and I joined, I was enlisted. I was in college, and I enlisted in the army. I thought I would be a communications officer in the army and that is how I got started, but things changed very much after that. Is that okay?
Taylor:
What did you actually do during the war?
Tinney:
I kept on just taking tests and passing them. I went to Harvard [University], MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Yale [University], all during the war. I got some college credits there, but I didn’t use them later on. I didn’t go overseas. I was waiting to be called to go at any time, but I stayed home on Saturday nights rather than going to town. They needed somebody in the Williams Field in Arizona, so I was sent there to become a radar officer and that was a great experience. After going to those great universities which has even augmented their staff with better experts than they usually had, I decided I couldn’t go back to Oregon State and there were things there so.
Taylor:
After the war, you studied electrical engineering at Stanford [University]. What was that like and when did you graduate?
Tinney:
I graduated in 1948 and the same year I was married to Alice Bailey. At Stanford, I had lots of enlightening experiences to reflect back on, and at the time I think it was an excellent choice. I had considered going to the east coast again to those big universities, but just decided to stay out west so I could take care of my parents who were aging.
Taylor:
All right. Okay. Now I think you got a master’s degree from Stanford after that?
Tinney:
Strangely, my master’s degree was in Liberal Arts. When I graduated from Stanford in 1948 the President, he told me that there were no recruiters for engineering there and none whatsoever, but there were lots of recruiters for education, so if you want to get a job and employment you better take one of those jobs. So, I thought I would become a high school teacher and that is what I expected. I ended up teaching the fifth grade in school which had earlier used the evenings there for the Ku Klux Klan to meet in Oregon. We had very few black people in Oregon at that time.
I learned a lot about electrical engineering in Stanford of course, but it was back in the old vacuum tube days, and it seems so far back in history now in the primitive days. So anyway, I did graduate in 1948, and of course in 1949, I got another duty, but it didn’t count directly toward my interest in science and engineering.
Taylor:
Bonneville Power Administration is a federal agency responsible for transmitting and marketing power mainly from federal hydro electrical projects on the Columbia River such as Grand Coulee. It is the oldest and a very large project. What led you to BPA?
Tinney:
I just thought that it was the place to be because I wanted to take care of my parents and there was no way that they would be leaving Portland. It turned out to be a good choice in the long run, very much so that Frederick Terman at Stanford was…yet he said you know… I had to take some kind of a job in education, and I was surprised that I was teaching the fifth grade. I reflect back on it, and it was a wonderful experience for me. Is that okay?
Taylor:
Okay. In the 1950s, computers were quite primitive. Tell us how you became involved in solving power system problems with the new digital computer?
Tinney:
In no time at all in BPA, I had always wanted to be in the system analysis section and be doing the research and things for that, so they sent me and some one or two other BPA people to Los Angeles to see the first computer that was offered. It was an interesting learning experience because computers were so primitive at that time, but I came back, and they said no, we will not buy that computer at all. I had to go back again, and on the second time down, I learned about the IBM 650. I said that was the computer that Bonneville Power Administration should get so that was it and everybody had to adapt to the IBM 650 at that time. So, what; I was already in an influential position at BPA at that time, and then I could make those decisions for them, and they didn’t question them. I felt very good about that. Okay?
Taylor:
One of two breakthrough methods you developed for the power program involves exploding the sparsity structure of what is called the nodal admittance matrix. Briefly, in simplifying there are thousands of substation boxes or nodes in a large, interconnected power system, but only a few direct lines between any two nodes. The matrix then has mostly zero for off diagonal terms. You and your team developed methods to store and compute only in the non-zero terms. Please expand on the sparsity programming techniques and why it is essential even with today’s computer capabilities?
Tinney:
Nobody sought a way. A Japanese fellow that I was with, and I said what we don’t need the complex numbers in the first place. We can do it all with Newton’s method and it is all and everything. He said, well, of course we can. We went out to lunch together and came back and we had exactly the same ideas we arrived at independently because we didn’t ever associate during the lunch period. So, we knew right away how to solve the problem. You could do it all mathematically and there were no zeros because you didn’t put a bit in it in the first place. They are artificial. [Arthur] Cayley, Sylvester, and [William Rowan] Hamilton, who invented the complex numbers and all, said we have certainly got something that nobody could ever use. And of course, they couldn’t have been further off because they are still using it today. That is, we had solved problems already in calculus class where you would calculate the distance to the center of the earth and show by calculus that that is how far away the earth would, all the gravity of the earth would be if you were going to do thing afterward with that knowledge. So, we didn’t know that that would actually be realized in our time, but it certainly has been vastly surpassed. Well, I don’t know, here do you want to try this that way.
Taylor:
The second breakthrough method involves the use of Newton’s method for solving the large sets of non-linear equations formulated as a sparse matrix equation. After iterations converts to a solution, a node voltage, node voltages are known and the line currents and powers can be computed, please discuss this development?
Tinney:
Yes. Well, it is so simple to do it and so obvious, that I realize that the great math teacher I had in first year algebra that she had and I together at the blackboard had more or less done the whole job. I certainly thought back on that years later when I was finally confronted with the real problem. All it was I noticed because I was lazy. I did like the blackboard over the constant term was all she changed to make a new problem and I thought that well I can use the work that I did to solve the previous problem and so that sort of the basis of the thing right there and it just went on so we wrote a paper up and submitted it and it got printed and explaining how to do it but nobody reviewed it or anything but they did accept it and publish but nobody could read it and paid no attention to it. So, I think that is about it.
Taylor:
The breakthrough methods were developed in the early 1960s with a landmark paper published in 1967. The citations are W.F. Tinney and J.W. Walker, “Direct Solutions of Sparse Network Equations by Optimally Ordered Triangular Actualization,” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1967. And also, W.F. Tinney and C.E. Hart, “Power Flow Solutions by Newton’s Method,” IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems, November 1967. During this time, you had many contacts with other power flow program pioneers both in industry and academe. In fact, BPA was a mecca for R&D (research and development), and you hosted many visitors. Please recall some interactions with others that I might term competitors?
Tinney:
After our 1967 paper was published, the one by Tinney and Walker, the one that went into the Proceedings [of the IEEE] and not the Transactions. The other one by Tinney and Hart went into the Transactions [IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems]. The one that went into the Proceedings set all kinds of records. I think it had thousands and thousands of references in other papers afterward and it went into many other fields besides power systems. So of course, I was notified of this over the telephone. They said you know; you should do this. I didn’t even tell the head of my section about that because I knew they would say oh, yes, yes, accept it and we will give you the secretaries and things. I knew we would need a lot of them, and they would have to be very good, [but] it could never happen because our budget was limited. So, I never told them about it, but I guess I can boast about it now. That paper, for about the next twenty years, was in every publication of the IEEE Proceedings and Transactions and things made references to it.
Taylor:
How long did it take for general acceptance of the BPA methods?
Tinney:
As soon as that paper appeared, it was accepted everywhere. Nothing ever got accepted more enthusiastically. As I said, there were all kinds of records set and I just got bored about even reading about it afterward or hearing about them. I was bowled over that anything like this actually happened.
I should go back though to make the story complete. I had been sent over to some place in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the others made their presentations and then I followed. I made my presentation, and they all were polite and applauded and things. Then when the meeting adjourned, a fellow came up and said that nobody understood what you were saying here but I did. Then he says, when I go back to IBM in Schenectady, New York, the northern part of New York, I will tell it to the best mathematicians in the world whom IBM had already told about and that is what he did. So, that was a big boost right there but from there on was nothing but plays and everything. I couldn’t begin to answer and respond to the people who wrote directly to me especially from other fields and things like that.
Taylor:
The most notable member of your team was Dr. Hermann Dommel, who was with BPA from 1966 to 1973 before becoming a professor at the University of British Columbia. He contributed at the highest level in areas of power flow, transient stability, and Electromagnetic Transients Programs (EMTP). Hermann’s and your work on optimal power flow solutions is especially significant. This landmark paper citation is H.W. Dommel and W.F. Tinney, “Optimal Power Flow Solutions [by Newton’s Method],” IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems, October 1968. This paper was voted the fifth most important paper in twentieth century power systems analysis. I am sure it was your reputation that brought Hermann from Germany to BPA. What are some of your memories?
Tinney:
He came to BPA because he was a very young man, but he was already considered to be the big guy in Germany. He wanted to come to BPA because we had already solved the power flow program and later on, we decided that we could optimize something, anything, and get an optimal solution for it. We wrote a combined paper on that, and it was very good, but in reflection, you know, we made tremendous progress since then. But that turned out to be so good that it was accepted worldwide, and in no time at all, every power system in the world was using the same things. But I didn’t realize how literally they had copied exactly what we were doing. Since then, I have been co-author of the papers where we showed that huge improvements, and yet they are not even accepted today. They don’t know about them. Of course, now they are subject to cyber-attacks and all those things, but whatever they use to solve the problems they all seem to go back to the BPA system analysis section. It is known very well everywhere except in Oregon and Portland and local places, and that is a peculiarity, but it just is the way things are.
Taylor:
Yes. So, there is a saying that you have to be thirty miles away to be an expert. Another alumni from your groups is Sherman Chan who went on to found Aspen, Inc. probably the leading company worldwide for protective relay software including a short circuit program using the BPA methods. Sherman worked with you in the summers during his MIT studies. He always says that he started as a janitor at BPA but tell us what he really did.
Tinney:
No. He came to BPA for seven years. He learned everything the BPA had, he took full advantage of it, and he carried it much much further and did all kinds of work. He was still single. At first, he thought there wasn’t anything to it at all and then when he found out how much there was to it, he took everything and he took three years off, usually using all the time to develop these programs. He did it with Vladimir Brandwine, and he offered him the chance to partners in the company that he intended to form. Vladimir refused because he was worried about the thing, so he [Sherman Chan] just founded the company himself and he has been terribly successful by all measures. He is the one who got the most money out of what we have done. I guess that is the summary of it. It could be said in much greater length, but I think that is sufficient for now.
Taylor:
BPA is a government agency who gave away the software it developed including power flow, transient stability, and EMTP. Their methods and codes are the basis for many of today’s programs worldwide. In China, companies for example have continually expanded your programs with wide usage throughout the country. Please discuss the relation between the methods and the program coding.
Tinney:
The program at BPA of course gave out very good information, so anybody else could do the same thing. Some of them acknowledged it. Typically, others like Japan [sent engineers over]. They [Japan] sent four engineers to over to BPA to do the job there. They came and that was fine. I learned later that China had done the same thing and of course they didn’t send anybody over, but they knew the names of everybody in the system analysis section and they are known all over the world again. The one place that hardly ever knew any of that is at BPA and Portland. Each one of these things could be made into a very long story, but there is one more I guess I can say and that it sounds very self serving here. The first place I was sent on a foreign trip was Sweden and Stockholm, Sweden. There I found out how that work had preceded me there. It was very different from what I thought it was and it was certainly used and recognized by all of their engineers.
Taylor:
On November 9, 1965, a Northeast blackout caused interest in power system digital software, especially a control center, online programs such as State Estimation, Power flow and Dynamic Securities Assessment. Shortly before I joined BPA in 1969, a branch at Power System Control was formed to design a new control center. Were you involved significantly in the online software development?
Tinney:
No. I was not directly involved in it, but it was done quite satisfactorily I thought. But no, I wasn’t directly involved. I was trying to come back a little earlier. When our paper was published, I had attended one of the meetings three years earlier and I had to be invited by one of the professors. They accepted it so I got to attend the meeting, but I didn’t participate in it. Of course, three years later I had been offered the chance to invite the people who get to come, and I had rejected that as I had explained earlier.
Taylor:
Your primary manager and supporter at BPA was Ralph Gens, himself a prominent engineer. What can you tell us about working with Ralph?
Tinney:
Ralph was very good. Although I was not the head of the system analysis section, I was given a salary that was higher than that of the man who was the head of it. I was surprised at that, but I was glad to have it. It was Ralph Gens worked so that it was terribly hard. It was the first time BPA had ever given an employee a higher salary than the head of the section that he worked in. I think it has happened many times since, but I was the first one in BPA that had that done and Ralph Gens certainly was behind it all.
Taylor:
Before going on to your post BPA career let me put a plug for other engineering at BPA during your time. BPA was recognized worldwide for other areas such as 500 KV transmission development, transmission level series and - - capacitor banks and Pacific HVDC interties. Notable engineers included Eugene Starr, Ralph Gens, Aaron Hingerodne, and Ed Kimbark. In the system analysis section, you managed Lee Cresap and Bill Mittlestadt and others developed what I think is the first significant wide area of stability control for modulation of the Pacific HVDC intertie. BPA has around twenty IEEE fellows and nine members of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Besides developing tools for planning of transmission expansion such as the Pacific interties, were you involved in other aspects of transmission R&D or system planning?
Tinney:
I can’t recall right now, but I certainly was. It was interesting that even after we got the IBM 650 and I wanted to work on electrical problems they said no, the important thing was to regulate the Columbia River. So, I had to take the work that was being done there on that and work on it. Since it was new for me to be doing any of that kind of programming, it was quite difficult. I think I spent a year just programming the regulation of the hydro dams. But I did see during that time lots of ways that could be optimized too, and later it has been. I think that is it right now.
Taylor:
You retired from BPA in 1979, but continued consulting for some major companies until physical problems occurred last year at age ninety-three. The companies included Boeing, Siemens Empros, a descendent from Control Data Corporation, and Easy Power. You have co-authored around twenty-eight IEEE Transaction papers mainly as a consultant. Can you describe some of your consulting work?
Tinney:
During my consulting work, I did lots and lots of reports constantly so I would be hired by them, but I don’t think anything was ever really implemented. Unfortunately, now I have even lost a lot of the work because I have discarded a lot of the things that I wrote. I wish that I could recover them now because I could give them to somebody else to use. I didn’t do it, I am sorry to say, but I do have quite a bit of it even here. I have done everything from the standpoint of three phase instead of single phase and took all the approximations out of it. Of course, I was using the great work that Hermann Dommel did which was unique in the world. Nobody had been anywhere near doing this, but I think in the end though there were twenty-five Ph.Ds. in universities who were working just on the work that BPA had done and applying it in various ways. Oh, I think it is enough. That’s it.
Taylor:
Well, we are almost done, Bill. You have received many awards during your career, [including the] U. S. Department of Energy Gold Medal, IEEE Fellow, election to the National Academy of Engineering, and the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Charles Concordia Award. You received the highest IEEE award, the [IEEE] Medal in Power Engineering in 2011, and an IEEE TV interview of you at that time can be found online. The most unique award you received; however, was the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government. Tell us about that.
Tinney:
I was invited by the Emperor and Empress of Japan to come over there and receive this award. I was concerned partly by, you know, they didn’t say anything about the expenses of getting there because they think the honor is the important thing and the expenses are just part of it. Since I didn’t have any family member at that time, I had been divorced about all my contingents supporting everything the same as before the divorce, I just had to decline. It was very shocking to them, and I felt very badly about it. I understand that it is a higher award than they had even given to the ex-governors of Oregon, so anyway I reflect on it. It would have been even worse if I had tried to take somebody along. I just didn’t then.
Taylor:
Computer capabilities have increased exponentially during your almost sixty years of software development. What do you see as the future of power system analysis and online energy management systems?
Tinney:
There is tremendous potential there, but that does remind me again that they said oh, your sparsity stuff is I mean obsolete now because we have parallel processing and all that. I said, well, it works even better in parallel than it does the way we have it now, so it will always be there in one way or the other. It has been accepted for so long that I think its origins are almost completely forgotten. In this list of the important papers in power in the twenty-first century, it is moving very close to the very front of it now. We just don’t know where to go from here, but it is certainly there, and there is nothing foreseeable that would make it any different than it has in the past. The ordering and everything and all of that is still just to be retained. How much the industry needs, really knows about this, is difficult to discern because it was all done so long ago. I am sure that somebody somewhere is already picking it up, but this gets to the whole culture of the power industry which tends to be competitive instead of cooperative. I don’t want to go into that now, but I could spend a long, long time just discussing that and its effect. I think in some ways, I look back and think, I don’t know anything about the distribution system and those things that, and yet the people that did all that work were terribly important, too. I don’t know why they rank this so highly as they do, but that is the way it is.
Taylor:
Thank you, Bill. You have had a remarkable career and are leaving an important legacy. I personally thank you for the support you have given me over the years. I transferred to your System Analysis Section in 1977 and you got me started with the IEEE PES (IEEE Power and Energy Society) committee work.
