Integrating Distributed Resources into the U.S. Power System

Abstract: The way electricity is generated, delivered, and used is in the midst of a significant transformation. Distributed energy resources, many of them on the consumer side of the meter, are expanding rapidly. In this talk I explore the outlook for our power systems as distributed technologies advances and consumer demands converge. How might these trends impact grid reliability and greenhouse gas emissions, and what impact might climate change policies have?

Bio: Marilyn A. Brown is a Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she created and directs the Climate and Energy Policy Lab. Before coming to Georgia Tech in 2006, Dr. Brown held leadership positions at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where she coordinated several multi-laboratory climate change mitigation studies, becoming a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States, as recognized by President Bill Clinton in 1998 during the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. She coined the term “energy efficiency gap”, and she developed methods to estimate and understand the gap.

Since 2010, she has been a Presidential appointee to the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority (the nation’s largest public power provider), where her focus on the integrated optimization of demand- and supply-side actions was recognized in 2016 by an Alliance to Save Energy “Champion” award. Her efforts on the TVA Board have helped put the agency on a track to reduce its CO₂ emissions in 2020 by 40% below its 2005 emissions. She has authored more than 250 publications and six books including Green Savings: How Markets and Policies Drive Energy Efficiency (Praeger Press, 2015) and Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Among her honors and awards, she is a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for co-authorship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on Mitigation of Climate Change. She has served on eight committees of the National Academies and is in her second term on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee.