December 2022

With the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and similar incentivizing initiatives all over the world, the clean energy transition is – more or less (and hopefully!) – set on long-term and fast(er) tracks. In this context, the roles and impact of grid modernization, its digitalization and the broader space of (what we call) the “smart grid” become rather interesting. This is because the electricity sector has never – practically – suffered from lack of capital. So one may ask why would the recently introduced frameworks matter and justify expectations for significant changes?

With the support of the IEEE Smart Grid, I invited some good friends, colleagues and alumni of my courses at CMU for a panel at the 2023 IEEE North America Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) conference. Together we will probe the new electricity sector landscape and answer some challenging questions about how the decarbonization of this space must rely on a range of solutions, including, among many others, infrastructure planning, energy security, non-wire alternatives and policy per se. I am grateful to my panelists Clare Callahan (Deloitte & CMU alumni), Doug Houseman (Burns McDonnell), Damir Novosel (Quanta Technology) and Rob Gramlich (Grid Strategies LLC, ex-FERC, ex-PJM & others) for joining me in this 1.5 hours endeavor on Tuesday, Jan. 17th at 12:30 pm ET! Special thanks go out to Hannah Morrey Brown (Burns McDonnell) & Shay Bahramirad (Quanta Technology) whom I had initially invited  as panelists, but needed to kindly defer to colleagues.

But wait… There’s more!

With the support of the Climate Change AI (CCAI) Initiative we are organizing a contest for questions for our panelists. The top-5 submitters (judged by CCAI Power & Energy Community Leads) will win complementary remote live access to the panel, during which they may ask their questions themselves! We are particularly interested in receiving questions from junior researchers and young professionals. The Contest will run until January 10th 23:59 AoE. The link to the contest is here. Best of luck to all of you!