About Joe
Dr. Joe Nyangon
Energy Executive. Inventor. Author. Patent Holder. Ph.D.
I'm an energy executive and expert in electricity market design, energy economics, AI for energy, and infrastructure resilience. My work spans the intersection of policy, markets, and technology, shaping how complex power systems evolve under changing regulatory, economic, and climate conditions. Key among these are the four frontiers defining the next decade of energy systems: power systems planning and electrification, market design, AI and machine learning for energy, and infrastructure resilience.
I lead Solutions Engineering for the Americas at Energy Exemplar, the SaaS enterprise intelligence software platform used by utilities, regulators, and developers to model transmission, resource adequacy, capacity expansion, storage, and the wave of large new loads — particularly AI data centers — now reshaping the grid. My team helps customers turn questions like "where do we site the next gigawatt of demand?" and "how do we keep this system reliable through 2035?" into specific, defensible answers.
Before Energy Exemplar, I served as Deputy Director of Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., where I directed more than $10 billion in clean-energy investment from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into U.S. states, tribes, territories, and local governments.
Three programs I'm proudest of from that work: the $8.8 billion Home Energy Rebates Program, which puts efficiency and electrification upgrades directly in reach of American households; the $1.25 billion Building Codes and Performance Standards Program, which helps states adopt the energy codes that lock in long-term savings; and the $260 million Workforce Training Program, which builds the skilled labor pipeline the electrification economy needs. The work meant coordinating with national laboratories, utilities, other federal agencies, and a long list of state and tribal partners — and translating IRA/IIJA statute into rules that money could actually move through.
Over Two decades across government, industry, and academia
Before DOE, I was Head of Power and Utilities Innovation and Senior Industry Consultant at SAS Institute, where I led the development of AI, machine-learning, and predictive-analytics solutions for utilities and energy companies. The work covered grid modernization, energy efficiency, demand response, prosumer behavior, and stranded-asset risk — and the partnerships behind it ran through state agencies, universities, national laboratories, and technology firms. It's also where my patent in machine-learning data preprocessing took shape: the techniques I developed for handling outliers and feature transformation in messy utility datasets eventually became the subject of U.S. Patent No. 12,254,001.
Earlier in my career I held research roles and fellowships at Johns Hopkins University's Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment (ISEP), the University of Delaware's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, where I'm currently a Non-Resident Fellow. That academic foundation is why most of what I do — even in industry — eventually gets published.
Education
Ph.D. - University of Delaware, Newark
MPA. - Columbia University, New York
M.Sc. - University of Greenwich, London
B.Sc. Eng. - University of Nairobi, Nairobi
Executive Education — MIT Sloan School of Management
Advisory roles and mission-critical programs
I serve on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, sit on the editorial boards of Energy Research and Social Science (Elsevier) and WIREs Energy and Environment (Wiley), and am a Senior Member of IEEE, Committee Member of IEEE Long Range Planning, and a member of INFORMS, IAEE, USAEE, CIGRE, ASCE, and IET. Across two decades, I have led technical and policy teams on the strategic implementation of mission-critical national programs, peer-reviewed research, and applied work that includes:
Power Systems Planning & Electrification
Federal Home Energy Rebates and Building Codes & Performance Standards
Building, transportation, and industrial electrification policy at DOE
Distributed energy resources (DERs) integration into wholesale electricity markets
Capacity expansion modeling, resource adequacy assessment, and transmission planning at IRA/IIJA scale
Electricity Market Design
FERC Order 1920, 2222 and 2023 implementation and DER market participation
Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) and energy-efficiency policy evaluation
Electricity price forecasting and anomaly detection in California markets
Wholesale market reform, capacity accreditation, and the Utility 2.0 business model transition
AI and Machine Learning for Energy
Techno-economic analysis and modeling of energy technologies
Physics-informed AI for electrical machines and maritime energy systems
Machine-learning data preprocessing (U.S. Patent No. 12,254,001)
Large-load and AI data center integration into the grid, including siting, interconnection, and tariff design
Infrastructure Resilience
Climate-proofing critical energy infrastructure
Stranded-asset analytics and transition-risk pricing
Climate-related financial-risk disclosure frameworks
Hydrogen energy systems economics, policy, and deployment use cases
Outside of work, I've lectured and presented in more than 25 countries, hold a Ph.D. in Energy Systems from the University of Delaware, where I also completed postdoctoral research, and live in Pennsylvania, United States. If you're working on one of The Four Frontiers above and think a conversation might be useful, the contact page is the fastest way to reach me.
Countries Visited
