He is a senior environmental engineer at the National Energy Technology Laboratory's Energy Systems Analysis Team. He leads life cycle analysis (LCA) research efforts on methane emissions from the natural gas value chain, alternative transportation fuels, and advanced power generation systems. He is the primary author of multiple natural gas and coal-related life cycle analyses published by U.S. Department of Energy. He also leads research on energy resource availability, integration of biomass and fossil energy resources, and strategic energy concepts for new programs. He has 20 years of experience in the field of energy analysis and is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University.
He is a human factors engineer in the Human Factors, Controls, and Statistics Department with 37 years of experience in various human factors engineering roles in heavy industry, defense, nuclear, and commercial organizations. His primary focus is on making work more effective, efficient, and satisfying through the design of human-centered tools, methods, and work environments. He has worked at Idaho National Laboratory since 2010. His current work includes researching and developing methods and procedures to integrate human factors principles in the systems engineering process for advanced and modernized nuclear power stations with an emphasis on human-system interfaces and control room design and information visualization. He has a master’s degree in human computer interaction from the University of South Africa and associate degrees in human computer interaction and industrial engineering.
He has 37 years of experience in probabilistic risk assessment, including methods development and regulatory applications of reliability analysis, risk analysis, and decision analysis. He also has 33 years of supervisory and project management experience in risk analysis, including program development and supervision of Ph.D. research. Much of his work focuses on commercial nuclear plants, but he has also worked on waste handling facilities, gaseous diffusion plants, accelerator-based systems, semiconductor manufacturing, space systems, and, more recently, offshore drilling facilities. In addition to his work at Idaho National Laboratory, he supports NASA’s Headquarters Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) in improving the technical basis for decision making in System Safety. Based in part on his contributions to NASA’s original PRA Procedures Guide, he supports the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) in developing guidance to conduct a Probabilistic Risk Assessment for offshore oil and gas industry operations. The team issued the first draft of BSEE’s guide at the end of Fiscal Year 2016. He has authored or co-authored more than 125 publications and technical reports.
Audun Botterud is an Energy Systems Engineer in the Center for Energy, Environmental and Economic Systems Analysis. His research focuses on modeling and analysis of electricity markets and power systems, using a variety of mathematical optimization and simulation methods. He is particularly interested in decision making under uncertainty as it pertains to the planning and operation of power and energy systems.
After joining Argonne in 2005, Botterud contributed to the development of the Electricity Market Complex Adaptive System (EMCAS) model and agent-based simulator of restructured electricity markets. More recently, his work has focused on challenges related to the integration of renewable energy (wind and solar) into the electric power grid. He led a project on improved wind power forecasting and better use of forecasts in electricity markets.
Previous to his tenure at Argonne, Botterud was part of SINTEF Energy Research in Trondheim, Norway. At SINTEF, he developed optimization tools for hydropower scheduling and reservoir management, and conducted studies of the Nordic electricity market. Some of his Ph.D. studies were performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Joseph H. Eto, senior advisor to LBNL's Electricity Markets and Policy Group and strategic advisor for LBNL's Energy Storage and Demand Resources Department. He leads the program office for the Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions, a national laboratory-university-industry R&D consortium founded by LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNL, PSERC, and the Electric Power Group that conducts research and analysis on electricity reliability and transmission.
Joe is a published expert on electricity reliability, transmission planning and operations, demand response, distributed generation, utility integrated resource planning and demand-side management, and building energy-efficiency technologies. Among other special assignments, Joe led coordination of technical support for preparation of all three DOE National Electric Transmission Congestion Studies (2006, 2009, 2015). He is a registered professional Mechanical Engineer in the State of California.
He is senior staff scientist at Idaho National Laboratory. His experience covers a wide range of research topics related to nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics, including two-phase flow modeling and simulation, numerical methods development in two-phase flow simulations, reactor safety analysis, system analysis code development, computational fluid dynamics in nuclear engineering, experimental two-phase flow, and experimental study on critical heat flux. His current work focuses on research and development of next-generation reactor system analysis code, modeling and simulation of two-phase flow, and thermal-hydraulics analysis to support advanced reactor designs (e.g., gas-cooled and molten salt-cooled high-temperature reactors). He has a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and earned a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
He is a staff research scientist working in the Nuclear System Design and Analysis Division at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). He has expertise in heat transfer, fluid mechanics, thermal design, thermodynamics and nuclear safety analyses. Over the last few years, he has been researching high temperature heat exchanger design and optimization, system integration and power conversion systems, and safety and reliability for Advanced Reactor Concepts, and also has extensive experience in the design and construction of large-scale experimental systems for nuclear and thermal-hydraulic research. He has more than 12 years of research and development experience in nuclear/thermal engineering and has been involved in several academic, industrial, and cross-discipline national laboratory research projects. He is currently working to develop a new multi-loop, multi-fluid advanced test facility designed to examine thermal hydraulic and materials issues associated with advanced nuclear reactor technologies. He has authored two books; contributed chapters to technical books on advanced reactors, thermal systems and process heat transfer; published over 100 peer-reviewed publications; and served as the INL lead for numerous partnerships. He holds an adjunct faculty appointment in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He obtained his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering with concentration in robotics and controls from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in nuclear engineering with a minor in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University, a master’s degree in engineering management from University of Idaho, and doctorate in nuclear engineering from University of Idaho.
He is a senior nuclear reactor physicist and a fellow in the Nuclear Science and Technology Directorate at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). He has extensive experience in reactor physics, criticality safety, depletion and spent fuel characterization, cross-section processing, and computer code verification and validation. He joined INL in 2010 from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to assume a leadership role in reactor physics methods and applications, supporting both the INL Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) and Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT). He is currently the principal investigator and research director for development and validation of a modeling and simulation capability for TREAT under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program (NEAMS). He also served as a technical lead for design, methods development, and validation for the conversion of ATR to Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) under the DOE Office of Material Management and Minimization. He is the primary developer of the NEWT and TRITON reactor physics computer codes released within the SCALE code system for nuclear analysis. He holds degrees in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University and is a fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS). He has served as session organizer and chair for numerous technical sessions at national conferences. He has more than 100 publications in journals, conference proceedings, and national laboratory reports related to computational methods and applications in reactor physics, radiation transport, criticality safety and depletion methods for spent nuclear fuel.
She is a senior scientist, director of the Building Technology and Urban Systems Division, and director of the Demand Response Research Center conducting research related to demand-response load control, open standards, building energy use, sensors, controls, information systems, simulation, and end-use analysis. She is the lead principal investigator for OpenADR automated demand response technology, the most prominent open standard for communication between electricity providers and customers, used by more than 5,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers across 10 countries. She has authored over 170 papers on efficiency and demand response.
Her expertise includes photovoltaic (PV) system performance evaluation and module reliability analysis risk analysis, photovoltaic performance and degradation, energy efficiency, technical supervision of the installation of utility-scale PV research plants, and supervision of the activities for a new PV module testing laboratory. She has developed a probabilistic risk analysis study to assess technical, occupational, and environmental risks for the manufacturing process of crystalline silicon PV cells. Her current research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of failures of PV modules with the support of the X-ray material analysis capabilities offered by the National Synchrotron Light Source. Her expertise in PV started in 2003 working with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in close contact with technical analysis and the normative context of PV module qualification. She has a master’s degree in electric engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, and doctorate in energy risk and safety from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Dr. Sean Peisert is jointly appointed as a staff scientist at LBNL, chief cybersecurity strategist at CENIC, and director of the CENIC/ESnet joint cybersecurity initiative. His research interests cover a broad cross-section of computer and network security. Recent projects include intrusion detection for control systems in smart/power grids, techniques for insider threat identification and mitigation, and security in high-performance computing and networking environments.
Sean is also an associate adjunct professor and faculty member in the Graduate Groups in Computer Science, Forensic Science, and Health Informatics at the University of California, Davis. Prior to roles at LBNL and CENIC, Sean was an I3P Research Fellow and computer security researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
He has more than 10 years of industrial and research experience in automation, instrumentation, and control. He holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University, a master’s degree in information technology and automation systems from Esslingen University of Applied Science in Germany, and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology in Jordan. In 2015, he joined Idaho National Laboratory as a research and development scientist with special focus on nuclear automation, instrumentation, and control. Before earning his doctorate, he worked at Asea Brown Boveri for 6 years and was a lead distributed control systems engineer by 2010. While pursuing his degree, he researched various nuclear engineering topics at Texas A&M University and worked for a year at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He also worked for Daimler Chrysler-Mercedes Group and Fraunhofer Institute for Production and Automation in Germany. He is a senior Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) member and author of several publications and technical reports. He is also a reviewer of nuclear energy and IEEE journals and U.S. Department of Energy grants.
Fill out the information below to ask your energy technology question. Our target response time is 14 business days; however, any individual may not be available to meet this target though we strive to provide a timely response.