Excelling against the odds
China's exceptional female workers making their mark in industries dominated by men
Empowered community
From her humble beginning as an electricity meter technician to becoming an industry-renowned skills master with multiple national patents, Meng Yuan remains dedicated to research and innovation in her industry.
The 47-year-old employee of the Guang'an branch of State Grid Sichuan Electric Power Co established her own innovation studio in 2014, after two decades of working at the front line.
A national-level studio, it has tackled key technical challenges in the electricity industry.
One such challenge was the corrosion of outdoor meter boxes. During routine meter replacements, Meng noticed the boxes, exposed to rain and sun, rusted easily. Replacing them required power outages and hours of labor.
"Could we speed this up without cutting power?" Meng thought. After repeated trials, her team invented a new meter box that can be installed without cutting power, slashing replacement time from 2 hours to mere minutes.
The invention won the Sichuan provincial excellence award for quality control, secured a national patent and entered mass production, significantly "improving efficiency and reducing costs", according to Meng.
In 2020, her team developed an artificial intelligence assistant for smart meters called Xiao Meng.
"This tool lets users check remaining power via voice command, offering real-time usage tracking. Elderly users can monitor electricity without leaving home," she said.
Expected to launch this year, the team has added a function monitoring household carbon emissions based on electricity usage to raise awareness of cutting carbon emissions. The device will be distributed free to some elderly people in need, while being sold via the company's e-commerce platform.
Meng has also helped enhance the data transmission channels of existing power information collection equipment. By integrating radio and television network fiberoptic technology with power data acquisition systems, residential areas adopting this fiber-optic transmission solution can achieve a 99.99 percent success rate in power information collection.
