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Agenda
April 2021
A new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides comprehensive recommendations for improving the U.S. electric power system so that it can adequately provide electricity to the nation in a safe, reliable, clean, resilient, and equitable way, especially as the U.S. pursues decarbonization of the energy supply. The report also recommends ways to accelerate innovations in technology, policy, and business models as global supply chains shift. This panel will offer a summary of key findings of this report, with a focus on technologies and tools.
Panelists
Deepak Divan
Professor and Director of the Center for Distributed Energy at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Deepak Divan is Professor, John E Pippin Chair, GRA Eminent Scholar and Director of the Center for Distributed Energy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. His field of research is in the areas of power electronics, power systems, smart grids and distributed control of power systems. He works closely with utilities, industry and is actively involved in research, teaching, entrepreneurship and starting new ventures.
Dr. Divan has started several companies, including Varentec in Santa Clara, CA, where he served as Founder, President and CTO from 2011-14, and as Chief Scientist for several years after. He led the company as it developed its suite of innovative distributed real-time grid control technologies. Varentec is funded by leading green-tech Venture Capital firm Khosla Ventures and renowned investor Bill Gates. He has founded or seeded several new ventures including Soft Switching Technologies, Innovolt, Varentec and Smart Wires, which together have raised >$160M in venture funding.
Dr. Divan is an elected Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, member of the National Academies Board on Energy and Environmental Systems and NASEM Committee on the Future Grid. He a Fellow of the IEEE, past President of the IEEE Power Electronics Society, is a recipient of the IEEE William E Newell Field Medal and is International Steering Committee Chair of the IEEE Empower a Billion Lives global competition to crowdsource scalable energy access solutions. He has 40 years of academic and industrial experience, 75 issued and pending patents, and over 400 reviewed publications. He received his B. Tech from IIT Kanpur, and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Calgary, Canada.
Anuradha Annaswamy
Director, Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory, MIT
Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy is Founder and Director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her research interests span adaptive control theory and its applications to aerospace, automotive, and propulsion systems as well as cyber physical systems such as Smart Grids, Smart Cities, and Smart Infrastructures. Her research team of 15 students and post-docs is supported at present by the US Air-Force Research Laboratory, US Department of Energy, Boeing, Ford-MIT Alliance, and NSF. She has received best paper awards (Axelby; CSM), Distinguished Member and Distinguished Lecturer awards from the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and a Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF. She is the author of a graduate textbook on adaptive control, co-editor of two vision documents on smart grids as well as two editions of the Impact of Control Technology report, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee study that published a report on the Future of Electric Power in the United States in 2021. She is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC. She served as the President of CSS in 2020.
Anjan Bose
Distinguished Professor of Power Engineering, School of EECS, Washington State University
Anjan Bose is a Regents Professor and the Distinguished Professor of Electric Power Engineering at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, where he also served as the Dean of the College of Engineering & Architecture from 1998 to 2005. In 2012-13 he served as a Senior Advisor to the US Department of Energy on the electric power grid during the Obama Administration. He is a leading researcher on the operation and control of the electric power grid. He has worked in the electric power industry as well as academe for over 40 years.
Dr. Bose is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of both the Indian and the Chinese National Academies of Engineering. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was the recipient of the Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award, the Third Millenium Medal, and the Herman Halperin Electric Transmission & Distribution Award from the IEEE. He has been recognized by both Iowa State University and the Indian Institute of Technology with their distinguished alumnus awards. He has served on several editorial boards and on many technical committees and conference organizations. He was appointed by the governor to the board of directors of the Washington Technology Center, and by the US Secretary of Energy on the committee to study the 1999 and 2003 power blackouts. He has served on several committees of the US National Academies and serves on its Governing Board. He was a founding member of the Governing Board of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and served as its President. He has consulted for many electric power companies and related government agencies throughout the world.
Moderator
Pramod Khargonekar
Vice Chancellor for Research and Distinguished Professor for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine
Pramod Khargonekar received B. Tech. Degree in electrical engineering in 1977 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, and M.S. degree in mathematics in 1980 and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1981 from the University of Florida, respectively. He has been on faculty at the University of Florida, University of Minnesota, The University of Michigan, and the University of California, Irvine. He was Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 1997 to 2001 and also held the position of Claude E. Shannon Professor of Engineering Science at The University of Michigan. From 2001 to 2009, he was Dean of the College of Engineering and Eckis Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida till 2016. He also served briefly as Deputy Director of Technology at ARPA-E, U. S. Department of Energy in 2012-13. He was appointed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to serve as Assistant Director for the Directorate of Engineering (ENG) in March 2013, a position he held till June 2016. In this position, Khargonekar led the ENG Directorate with an annual budget of more than $950 million. In addition, he served as a member of the NSF senior leadership and management team and participated in setting priorities and policies. In June 2016, he assumed his current position as Vice Chancellor for Research and Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.
Khargonekar’s research and teaching interests are centered on theory and applications of systems and control. His early work was on mathematical control theory, specifically focusing on robust control analysis and design. During the 1990’s, he was involved in a major multidisciplinary project on applications of control and estimation techniques to semiconductor manufacturing. His current research and teaching interests include systems and control theory, machine learning, and applications to smart electric grid and manufacturing. He has been recognized as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher. He is a recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Award, IEEE Control Systems Society Bode Lecture Prize, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the American Automatic Control Council’s Donald Eckman Award, the Japan Society for Promotion of Science fellowships, World Automation Congress Honor, the IEEE W. R. G. Baker Prize Award, the IEEE CSS George Axelby Best Paper Award, the Hugo Schuck ACC Best Paper Award, and the Distinguished Alumnus and Distinguished Service Awards from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and AAAS. At the University of Michigan, he received the and Claude Shannon Chair and Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship. In the past, he has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, SIAM Journal of Control, Systems and Control Letters, and International J. of Robust and Nonlinear Control, and is currently on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of IEEE. He has served on numerous committees in IEEE, IFAC, and AAAS. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of MForesight - a manufacturing think-tank, of the Governance Board of Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), and External Advisory Board of Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, Governing Board of CENIC, Advisory Board of NSF Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA), Scientific Advisory Board of NSF ERC on Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture, and co-chair of the Applied Research Working Group of the University of California Global Climate Leadership Council (GCLC).
