insight
Cutting Carbon While Keeping the Lights On
The United States could replace 100% of its coal generation with renewables, storage, and demand-side management while maintaining reserve margins.
Alex Engel is an Associate in Rocky Mountain Institute’s Carbon-Free Electricity Practice. Alex led the development of RMI’s modeling tools that analyze the potential of portfolios of distributed energy resources to obviate the need for T&D solutions and/or new thermal power plants.
Background
Prior to joining RMI, Alex received his master’s degree from the University of Michigan in Natural Resources and Environment with a focus on Sustainable Systems. While in graduate school, Alex worked at RMI on the Blockchain for Energy project helping build a foundation of knowledge for RMI about the technology and developing possible use cases.
Before returning to graduate school, Alex worked at Fundamental Capital Management as an investment analyst and operations manager. He helped develop and launch the firm’s second fund which invests in structured credit. He also built quantitative tools to analyze research efficacy as well as sources of performance and risk in hedge fund portfolios to support portfolio and risk management.
Education
MS, Natural Resources and Environment (Sustainable Systems), University of Michigan
Certificate, Industrial Ecology, University of Michigan
BA, The History of Political Economy, New York University
Location
Basalt, CO
Authored Works
Blog
Clean Energy Is Canceling Gas Plants
While COVID-19 has disrupted many aspects of the economy and daily life in 2020, the trend toward clean electricity is still going strong. Renewable energy and storage technology costs continue to fall, with expanding adoption by utilities and other investors, while new gas-fired power plants face ever-stronger financial headwinds. Data…
Blog
Report Release: The Economics of Clean Energy Portfolios
Download RMI’s new report, The Economics of Clean Energy Portfolios The US power system is one of the largest, most complicated, and most expensive machines in the world, but the grid’s core infrastructure is old and is not aging gracefully. Nearly 500 gigawatts (GW), or about half of the…
Blog
The Billion-Dollar Costs of Forecasting Electricity Demand
We make forecasts every day, and the technologies and other tools that help us make these forecasts are getting better each year. Weather forecasts, for example, have improved dramatically in the age of supercomputers and high-resolution climate models, and can now accurately predict the timing of rain or other events…