Power Systems Planning & Electrification
For utilities, ISOs, and grid planners.
How utilities should plan generation, storage, transmission, and rapidly electrifying load in an era of variable resources and shifting demand. Includes my DOE work on $10B+ in IRA and IIJA programs - Home Energy Rebates, Building Codes, and Workforce Training - and recent research on physics-informed AI for electrical machines.
What this frontier is about
Power systems planning and electrification have collapsed into a single problem. A decade ago, planners could treat generation, transmission, and load as separate forecasting exercises. Today, the same plan must absorb gigawatts of new variable generation, integrate distributed energy resources, accommodate building and transportation electrification, and handle the wave of hyperscale AI data centers redrawing demand curves - all at once, and on timelines compressed by climate commitments and federal funding deadlines.
This frontier is where my federal program work, my utility analytics work, and my decision-intelligence work at Energy Exemplar converge. It is the operational core of the energy transition.
How I work in this area
Three threads run through my research and applied portfolio:
Federal program execution at scale. As Deputy Director of Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Energy, I directed more than $10 billion in Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding into states, tribes, territories, and local governments. The three programs that anchored that portfolio — the $8.8 billion Home Energy Rebates Program, the $1.25 billion Building Codes and Performance Standards Program, and the $260 million Workforce Training Program — represent the federal scaffolding for building, transportation, and industrial electrification across the United States.
Distributed energy resources and customer choice. Long before "DER integration" became a buzzword, my published work examined how distribution system planning, utility business models, and regulatory frameworks have to change when customers stop being purely passive loads. To this end, I have studied case studies from the United States (i.e.,New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV), Illinois’s NextGrid and California’s Energy Savings and Performance Incentive), the U.K.’s RIIO (Revenue = Incentives + Innovation + Outputs), Germany’s Energiewende, and Australia’s Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap. These frameworks provide conceptual bases with which to imagine the electric power industry of the future as well as a practical solution to study the potential and future of DERs in other states. The New York Reforming the Energy Vision (REV)analysis, the polycentric smart-cities framework, and the broader Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) research thread all sit here.
Decision intelligence for capacity expansion and resource adequacy. At Energy Exemplar I lead Solutions Engineering for the Americas — the team that helps utilities, ISOs, and developers stress-test capacity expansion plans, resource adequacy assessments, transmission build-outs, and the integration of multi-gigawatt new loads against the full range of plausible futures. The Smart Grid Strategies for Tackling the Duck Curve work is one applied output of that effort.
My selected publications and thought leadership in this frontier
Books and chapters
Contested Temporalities of Critical Minerals and Resource Extraction for Electric Vehicles — Edward Elgar Handbook on Inequality and Natural Resources - 2026 (forthcoming)
Sustainable Energy Investment: Technical, Market and Policy Innovations to Address Risk — co-edited with Dr. John Byrne, IntechOpen-2021
Entangled Systems at the Energy-Water-Food Nexus: Challenges and Opportunities — IGI Global - 2017
Recent research and applied work
Federal program leadership (press and recognition)
For the full archive, see Publications →
What this means for Systems Operators, utilities, and Other Market Participants
If you're a utility planner, the question is no longer whether to incorporate DERs and electrification load into your IRP — it's how to do it without underbuilding transmission or overbuilding capacity that the next regulatory cycle will strand. If you're an ISO, the question is how to keep resource adequacy honest in a world of variable generation, demand-response participation, and AI-load surprise. And if you're running a federal or state program, the question is how to translate statute into rules that money can actually move through — without losing the policy intent in the process.Hybrid Physics-Informed Artificial Intelligence for High-Fidelity Modeling and Optimization of Electrical Machine
