Events

Past Event

Smart, Secure, and Sustainable... Repowering - The Future Ain't What it Used to Be

November 30, 2018
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
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Schapiro CEPSR, 530 W. 120 St., New York, NY 10027 Davis Auditorium (Room 412, 4th Floor)
This seminar features Terry Boston, former CEO and President of PJM, an electric utility serving nearly one fifth of the US population. Refreshments will be served at 10:00am, and the lecture will begin at 10:30am. When Terry Boston started his career at the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1972 the mission was clear: "To serve the people; to serve the region; to raise the standard of living for the people we serve." Nothing has improved our standard of living or our productivity more than electricity. As Columbia University looks at 'Repowering our Planet' we must remember that there are about 1.2 billion people in the world today that have no electricity. This energy poverty is unacceptable and must be corrected. This presentation will compare the year 2000 predictions of the future to what has occurred, and it will highlight some of the cyber and physical threats we face today. Since the year 2000 there have been two major sea changes in the energy business: 1) the cost of renewable resources has really come down and will continue to do so; 2) the price and the availability of natural gas was not in our crystal ball as little as a decade ago. These two things give us the opportunity to electrify transportation and to continue to improve the standard of living for our planet’s 7.7 billion population. There are going to be huge opportunities in distributed energy resources and the best way to predict the future of energy is to create it as Columbia University continues to focus on repowering the planet. About the speaker: After serving as president and CEO of PJM for 8 years, Mr. Boston retired at the end of 2015. Mr. Boston is a 2017 U.S. Presidential appointee to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC/DHS) to advise the US President re: security and he was the 130th president of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies & past president of GO 15, association of the world’s largest power grid operators. Mr. Boston was the first chair of the North American Transmission Forum and was one of the eight experts selected to direct the North American Electric Reliability Corporation(NERC) investigation of the Aug. 14, 2003, Mid-West/Northeast blackout. Mr. Boston was honored with the 2011 “Leadership in Power” award from the IEEE Power and Energy Society. He led PJM to win Platts Global Energy Awards for Industry Leadership in 2010, Excellence in Electricity in 2012 and in December 2015 he was unanimously selected the winner of the Global Energy Life Time Achievement Award. In 2014 Mr. Boston, PE was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Contact Information

Hayley Martinez