Bent Ear Solutions (BES) today announced that it is working with Bill Meehan, PE, through WJM Electric Consulting LLC, as an independent Executive Consultant supporting selected BES utility engagements. Meehan, a veteran electric utility executive and the author of four books on utilities and GIS, brings decades of experience in electric utility operations, engineering, and geospatial technology. He spent two decades in leadership at a major electric utility in the Northeast and two decades at Esri as Director of Electric Utility Solutions.
Through WJM Electric Consulting LLC, Meehan provides independent advisory and consulting services to utilities, technology companies, and other organizations across the industry. His work with BES is one part of that broader consulting practice.
Meehan has worked on both sides of a gap many utilities still live with. As an operations executive, he answered for reliability and restoration. As leader of his company’s GIS program, he was responsible for the data that told crews where the lines and equipment were. In BES’s utility work, those two functions often report to different leaders and work from different priorities, even though the GIS network model feeds outage management and storm restoration every day.
Meehan will collaborate with two utility leaders already working with BES’s Executive Consulting Team. Alan Bradshaw spent 42 years at Dominion Energy, where he oversaw operations centers and storm response coordination. Beth Bartholomew has spent more than 30 years helping investor-owned and municipal utilities across North America strengthen their emergency management programs. BES formed the team in 2023 so clients could work directly with people who have walked in their shoes and understand their challenges. It added its first utility consultants in 2025 and has grown rapidly since.
“Bill ran electric operations at a major utility and built its GIS program before spending two decades helping utilities around the world get more out of theirs. No one in the world is better qualified to advise electric utilities on getting the most out of their geospatial technology. We’re pleased to work with Bill and WJM Electric Consulting LLC as we continue to grow our utilities practice, helping utilities maximize the capabilities of the technology they already own.”
Two decades at an electric utility, and two at Esri
At his Northeast utility, Meehan held leadership roles as Vice President of Electric Operations and Supply Chain and Director of Engineering. He started the company’s GIS program in the late 1980s and led it through a successful implementation.
At Esri, he helped utilities worldwide use GIS to improve reliability and make better operating decisions. His articles and blogs on utility GIS have drawn more than half a million views.
Meehan has written four books: Empowering Electric and Gas Utilities with GIS (Esri Press), GIS for Enhanced Electric Utility Performance (Artech House), Modeling Electric Distribution with GIS (Esri Press), and Power System Analysis by Digital Computer (Northeastern University Press). A registered Professional Engineer in Massachusetts, he holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Northeastern University and a master’s degree in electric power engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has taught at Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts.
Utility audiences know him as a speaker who makes complex subjects easy to follow.
“When I started our GIS program in the late 1980s, the company saw it as a faster way to draw maps. Now it is a key decision-making platform. The control room and the storm teams rely on it, so it has to be right. Through WJM Electric Consulting LLC, I work with organizations across the utility industry on these kinds of challenges. I’m pleased to collaborate with BES, whose capabilities often complement my own.”
How Meehan will support BES electric utility clients
As part of selected BES engagements, Meehan will advise utility clients on improving coordination between GIS and operations teams and on maintaining an accurate model of the grid. That applies in day-to-day operations, where data quality can affect how quickly a work order moves, and in storm and outage response, where restoration crews and the operations center need the same picture at the same moment.
For these engagements, Meehan will work with BES through WJM Electric Consulting LLC, complementing BES’s existing consulting and implementation capabilities. BES approaches engagements by configuring the ArcGIS and Microsoft 365 environments a utility already licenses, rather than adding another platform. BES calls this method the Connected Framework, and utility emergency preparedness centers are among the teams that use it.
