DOE Assistant Secretary Jereza meets CMU energy researchers

Assistant Secretary Katie Jereza of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity visited Carnegie Mellon University on September 17 to engage with stakeholders doing groundbreaking work on some of the timeliest power and electricity focus areas.

Assistant Secretary Jereza’s visit was hosted by the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, CMU’s hub for advancing entrepreneurship, collaborative research, and strategic partnerships focused on the future of energy. During opening remarks, Dean Burcu Akinci elevated the deeply collaborative, technical expertise of the College of Engineering’s faculty in academic research and entrepreneurship toward energy breakthroughs, setting the stage for two roundtable research discussions with faculty that centered on themes of large load integration and electricity affordability. These topics are adjacent to evolving conversations about Super Intelligence (SI), grid reliability, resilience and security, workforce development, and U.S. manufacturing.

“Assistant Secretary Jereza’s visit speaks to Carnegie Mellon’s role as a primary engine for grid innovation to meet our country’s evolving energy demands,” said Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute. “Through the Scott Institute, we are uniting multidisciplinary teams across campus to build a more resilient, reliable, and affordable power grid while training the workforce needed to lead it.”

Samaras and Valerie Karplus, associate director of the Scott Institute, moderated these robust conversations. Numerous Scott Institute faculty affiliates shared their work with Assistant Secretary Jereza.

Assistant Secretary Jereza’s visit speaks to Carnegie Mellon’s role as a primary engine for grid innovation to meet our country’s evolving energy demands.

Costa Samaras, Director, Scott Insitute of Energy Innovation

Ramteen Sioshansi spoke to the merits of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center (CEIC), which he leads as its director. In another example of CMU’s holistic approach to creating future leaders equipped to tackle challenges in academia and industry alike, Sioshansi noted that CEIC doesn’t stop at engineering. In fact, its dozens of affiliated faculty and Ph.D. students engage with factors like economics and policy, in addition to honing their technical prowess, to produce research findings that are significant to a variety of stakeholders working in areas like industry and policy.

Sioshansi additionally presented with colleague Woody Zhu of Heinz College about enhanced decision-making and improved prediction of threats to the grid, like wildfires and storms. Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Larry Pileggi and Aayusha Agarwal spoke about their work to support fast, accurate grid planning and operation models, and CyLab’s Vyas Sekar, also in electrical and computer engineering, touched on cyber autonomy and combatting SI attackers with SI defenders. Gauri Joshi, another electrical and computer engineering faculty member, presented work on coordinating SI workloads with power grid operation. Engineering and Public Policy’s Paulina Jaramillo focused on modeling and managing future loads on the grid; Granger Morgan and postdoctoral research associate Madeline Yozwiak, both also in engineering and public policy, shared insights on overcoming technical, regulatory, and community acceptance barriers to expanding transmission capacity.

Additionally, the Assistant Secretary’s visit gave a few recent Ph.D. graduates in attendance a valuable experience communicating the relevance of their research to an audience beyond the realm of academia.

These roundtable conversations underscored the College’s motto of advanced collaboration and also demonstrated CMU’s aptitude for producing rigorous research findings that can be complementary to discussions about critical energy problem-solving at a national level.