Hall of Fame Inductee 2021

Audrey Zibelman 2021 Hall of Fame Inductee

Education

Audrey Zibelman attended penn state university, where she receivied her bachlor of arts, and later attended Hamline University school of law, where she received her doctor of law.

Career

Audrey Zibelman leads X’s moonshot for the electric grid. The modeling and analytic tools that are relied on to design and operate the power systems were developed for a different era and are proving to be no longer sufficient for the fast transitioning decarbonised, decentralised power system. Audrey’s team is working with leading utilities, system operators and other industry players worldwide to design and develop the new computational tools, enabled by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, required to model, simulate, and operate a decarbonised grid with a shared objective to accelerate secure, affordable and equitable grid decarbonisation worldwide.Audrey has spent over three decades leading organizations with the goal of making power cleaner, more affordable and more reliable.

She is an international expert in power system transformation, regulation, markets and operations. She’s also been a utility executive, regulator, system operator and entrepreneur.

Audrey joined X from the Australian Energy Market Operator where she was the Managing Director and CEO. AEMO plans and operates the electricity and gas systems and markets for Australia. While at AEMO, Audrey oversaw AEMO’s development of a market for consumer owned distributed resources, an integrated system plan that established the accepted roadmap for Australia to decarbonise its national power system and implemented new processes for safe operations of the power system during extreme climate events, including bushfires and major heat storms.

Along with other grid operators internationally, Audrey founded the Global Power System Transformation organisation, which has received recent support from the Biden administration to support directed research into grid decarbonisation. Audrey also sat on the Energy Security Board, the entity charged with regulatory and market reform for Australia and served as an energy advisor to the commonwealth scientific and industrial research organization (CSIRO), Australia’s national science and research agency, where she advised on innovation in technology development and deployment.

Prior to joining AEMO, Audrey was the Chair of the New York Public Service Commission where she was a member of the Governor’s cabinet and oversaw the electric, gas, water, steam and communication utilities in New York. While in New York, Audrey oversaw massive regulatory reform of the electric industry to support a decarbonised grid, known as Reforming the Energy Vision, or REV.Audrey also served as the Executive Vice President and COO at PJM and oversaw the system operator’s growth from 5-13 States and development of demand side markets. She also served as an executive at Xcel Energy where she developed the utility’s first renewable development programs and was the founder and CEO of Viridity Energy, an organisation that, among other things, integrates batteries as resources on the grid.Along with her executive roles, Audrey has served on multiple boards with responsibility of overseeing and advising on grid modernisation. She currently serves as a non-executive Board member on EOS Energy, a long storage battery company, Advanced Energy Economy, the GridWise Alliance and the Monash University (Australia) Energy Advisors Committee.

And for all those reasons we are today inducting Audrey Zibelman into the Digital 360 Summit Hall of fame!