ECE Seminar by Shay Bahramirad: Climate Change and Resilience Planning of Electric Power System
Armour College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will welcome Shay Bahramirad, the Vice President of Climate and Resilience at Quanta Technology, to present a lecture, “Climate Change and Resilience Planning of Electric Power System.”
Abstract: The electricity sector is the key enabler of all critical infrastructure sectors that billions of people across the world depend on. However, the electricity sector is under increased threat due to the ever-evolving impacts of climate change and weather events that are becoming more frequent and severe. Disruptions to the electrical infrastructure propagate to other sectors creating a domino effect. Climate change and its consequences have direct impacts on the electric grid, e.g., heat waves and record-breaking winter temperatures cause demand surges beyond expectations, and distribution substations are highly vulnerable to flooding. These threats are compounded in the face of aging infrastructure. The direct impacts from climate change put great emphasis on developing resiliency planning frameworks to adapt to the impacts of severe events on the functions of the electric grid. The increasing frequency of events makes it inevitable for resiliency planning and solutions to become a part of coordinated planning functions in the electricity sector and investment prioritization frameworks including generation, transmission, and distribution. Resiliency planning is even more critical since not only the climate change and its impacts are evolving, but also the grid is evolving toward a more sustainable and renewable future with emerging solutions including Microgrids and distributed energy resources. More importantly, a resilient infrastructure is the building block of incorporating renewables and emerging technologies into the grid.
Biography: Dr. Shay Bahramirad is the Vice President of Climate and Resilience at Quanta Technology. She is responsible for assisting cities and utilities with climate change risk assessments for their assets, operations, and services and for developing mitigation strategies and investment strategies for adapting to climate change. Dr. Bahramirad has held several positions in the Energy Sector, including Vice President of Engineering and Smart Grid at ComEd: the electric utility in Illinois. In these roles, she has overseen and/or executed “grid of the future” visions, technical roadmaps, analytical frameworks, and investment strategies of distribution system and communication network. She has also been responsible for system reliability, DER integration, grid strategy and analytics, standards, maintenance inspection, emerging technologies, STEM programming, and reimagining the power grid to mitigate and adapt to climate change. She has also developed talent strategies, industry engagement plans, and advocacy programs to support business objectives. She has been the expert witness and testified on several state and federal regulatory proceedings around microgrids, energy storage, investment strategies, and distributed generation interconnection. Dr. Bahramirad is the President-Elect of the IEEE Power and Energy Society. Dr. Bahramirad is an editorial board member of the Electricity Journal, US CIGRE Executive member, an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the IEEE/PES Vice President of New Initiatives and Outreach, overseeing the organization’s engagement with policymakers globally around technical issues, investment strategies, emerging technologies, and developing plans for the next generation of frameworks including smart cities, and clean energy and running the philanthropy activities of IEEE/PES; Smart Village. She is the contributor to the United Nations SG7, Affordable and Clean Energy.