Skip to content Skip to sidebar Skip to footer
electricity 1

18 October 2019, 12 AM – 1 PM ET
View Event Recording | View Special Issue

Speakers

Description

This webinar will provide an overview of the main issues, ideas, and solutions discussed in the September 2019 Proceedings special issue “Electricity for All: Issues, Challenges, and Solutions for Energy-Disadvantaged Communities.” Waterloo’s Professor Jatin Nathwani will open the webinar with a synopsis of the policy and social issues associated with energy access. Berkeley’s Professor Dan Kammen will then review various aspects of data relevance and requirements, as well as planning approaches and tools to facilitate electricity access. Finally, Waterloo’s Professor Claudio Cañizares will discuss some of the examples and deployments addressing electricity access in various regions of the world introduced in the special issue. The presentations will be followed by Q&A with the panelists.

About the Presenters

Jatin Nathwani (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in engineering from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in 1979. He was involved in a leadership capacity in the Canadian energy sector over a 30-year period. He brings a unique combination of academic perspectives with extensive experience in the business sector that includes corporate planning and strategy, energy sector policy reform, power system planning, environmental and regulatory affairs, and research program management. In 2007, he joined the University of Waterloo (UW), Waterloo, ON, Canada, where he is currently the Founding Executive Director of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE), holding the prestigious Ontario Research Chair in Public Policy for Sustainable Energy. As a Leader of WISE, he focuses on bringing together the expertise of UW faculty members to develop and implement large-scale multidisciplinary research projects in collaboration with business, industry, governments, and civil society groups, to meet the Institute’s vision of clean energy, accessible, and affordable for all. He is also the Co-Director, with Prof. J. Knebel at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, of the consortium Affordable Energy for Humanity (AE4H): A Global Change Initiative, which comprises more than 150 leading energy access researchers and practitioners from 50 institutions and 25 countries, focusing on the eradication of energy poverty. He serves on several boards at the provincial and national levels and has appeared frequently in the media (print, TV, and radio), having more than 100 publications related to energy and risk management, including seven books. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario.

Daniel Kammen (Member, IEEE) served as the first Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, World Bank, Washington, D.C., USA, from 2010 to 2011 and was an Energy and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) Fellow with the U.S. State Department from 2010 to 2016. From 2016 to 2017, he served as the Science Envoy for the U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C. He is currently a Professor of energy with appointments in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG), the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, where he is the Chair of ERG and directs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL). He is a Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is a Co-Developer of the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) Financing Model, an energy efficiency and solar energy financing plan that permits installation of clean energy systems on residences with no upfront costs. PACE was named by Scientific American as the No. 1 World Changing Idea of 2009 (co-developed with Cisco DeVries). Recently, his work on urban minigrids and the EcoBlock concept was rated as a World-Changing Idea of 2017 by Scientific American. He has authored more than 400 publications and 12 books and has testified over 40 times at state and U.S. congressional hearings.

Claudio Cañizares (Fellow, IEEE) received the Electrical Engineer Degree from Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN), Quito, Ecuador, in 1984, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. From 1983 to 1993, he held different teaching and administrative positions with EPN. He is currently a Full Professor and the Hydro One Endowed Chair with the Electrical and Computer Engineering (E&CE) Department, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, where he has held various academic and administrative positions since 1993. He has authored or coauthored many highly cited journal and conference articles, as well as several technical reports, book chapters, disclosures, and patents, and has been invited to make multiple keynote speeches, seminars, and presentations at numerous institutions and conferences worldwide. His current research interests include the study of stability, control, optimization, modeling, simulation, and computational issues in large as well as small grids and energy systems in the context of competitive energy markets and smart grids. In these areas, he has led or been an integral part of many grants and contracts from government agencies and private companies and has collaborated with various industry and university researchers in Canada and abroad, supervising/cosupervising a large number of research fellows and graduate students. Dr. Cañizares is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, where he is currently the Director of the Applied Science and Engineering Division of the Academy of Science, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He was a recipient of the 2017 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award, the 2016 IEEE Canada Electric Power Medal, and various IEEE PES Technical Council and Committee awards and recognitions, holding leadership positions in several IEEE-PES Technical Committees, Working Groups, and Task Forces.