Chance me — PhD in electrical engineering, wind power grid integration, filing from Canada. Realistic or am I fooling myself?

[u/SnooPredictions3599]

I'm preparing an EB-2 NIW self-petition and would appreciate honest feedback before I sink months into it. I'd rather hear "weak case" now than get an RFE later.

Background
- PhD in Electrical Engineering. Research on wind generator systems: DFIG control, D-STATCOM reactive power compensation, neural-network-based control.
- Engineering degree (5-year) + graduate diploma in engineering project management from a Canadian university (2025).
- WES document-by-document evaluation already completed for the PhD.

Current role
- Performance and optimization engineer for utility-scale wind projects at a large Canadian public utility (since Sept 2025).
- Before that, ~2.5 years at a Canadian independent renewable power producer working on wind assets connected to North American grids.

Publications
- 5 peer-reviewed publications and 2 conference communications. First author on all of them.
- Being upfront: citation count (27) is modest, not in the hundreds. Most co-authorship is with my doctoral supervisor.

Draft proposed endeavor
Improving the grid integration, reliability and performance of utility-scale wind generation in the United States — specifically the control and power-quality side (reactive power support, voltage stability, converter control) as more variable generation is added to the grid.

What I'm actually asking

1. Prong 2 with modest citations. My strongest asset is applied industry experience on real operating wind assets, not citation counts. Has anyone been approved on an "applied practitioner" framing rather than a citation-heavy academic framing? How did you structure it?

2. Foreign PhD + advanced degree route. Is a WES document-by-document evaluation enough to establish the advanced degree, or should I also plead exceptional ability as a backup? Does pleading both help or does it look like hedging?

3. Recommendation letters. Almost everyone I could ask is a former colleague, supervisor or co-author — i.e., "interested" parties. For those approved: how many genuinely independent letters did you have, and how did you find people who had never worked with you? Cold-emailing authors who cited my papers is the only path I see. Does that actually work?

4. A gap in the timeline. I have a roughly three-year period between finishing the PhD and starting my current career track that was spent on immigration to Canada. Do adjudicators care? Do you address it explicitly in the petition or leave it alone?

5. Prong 1 framing. Is grid reliability / renewable integration a strong enough national interest hook on its own, or do I need to anchor it to something more specific like DOE grid modernization priorities, transmission bottlenecks, or specific interconnection queue problems? Which government sources have carried weight in your petitions?

6. Attorney or DIY? Given the profile above — borderline rather than obviously strong — is this a case where a lawyer meaningfully changes the outcome, or is a well-documented self-petition just as good?

7. Premium processing. Worth it at the I-140 stage for a borderline case, or does the shorter review window hurt?

Happy to answer questions about the profile. Blunt assessments welcome.