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Mark will share his latest thought leadership on the grid of the future. Looking at the challenges and opportunities for the next two decades, Mark will be drawing on his last two decades of experience with renewable energy integration and his current activities as chair of the SPP Future Grid Strategies Advisory Group, active member of the NERC Reliability Issues Steering Committee, and president of the Energy Systems Integration Group that marshals the expertise of the electricity industry’s technical community to support grid transformation and energy systems integration and operation.

Mark will discuss themes that are emerging from this work and the implications on planning and operating our bulk power system in the next decades. Topics will be discussed in a conversational style and cover a range of topics including implications of the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, green hydrogen and other large load growth, the emergence of “load hybrids” with the risk of large-scale grid defection, and challenges to our models and grid management software platforms. There will be time for your questions and discussion.

Mark Ahlstrom is Vice President of Renewable Energy Policy for NextEra Energy Resources. He is also President of the Board of Directors of the Energy Systems Integration Group, the non-profit technical collaboration association for engineers, system operators, researchers and policymakers working on our rapidly transforming energy systems. He currently serves on NERC’s Reliability Issues Steering Committee and chairs the SPP Future Grid Strategy Advisory Group, and he previously served on the NERC Essential Reliability Services Working Group and the NERC Integrating Variable Generation Task Force. Today, Mark focuses on rapid grid transformation pathways that are accelerated by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 with emphasis on reliability, economics, and innovation.

A series of serendipities brought Mark to his last two decades of working on the reliable integration of clean energy into power systems and markets. A biochemistry and biomedical engineering graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mark initially worked as a software engineer at Honeywell Avionics and then as an artificial intelligence researcher at the Honeywell Computer Sciences Center before leaving to be founder of two software companies. In late 2000 he became CEO of WindLogics, a venture-funded computational weather modeling company that applied its technologies to improved understanding of wind energy projects. WindLogics was acquired in 2006 and is now the NextEra Analytics division of NextEra Energy Resources—America’s premier clean energy leader and the world’s largest producer of wind and solar energy.