Renewable Energy Conference

2025 SPEAKERS

Rob GramLich

Rob Gramlich is Founder and President of Grid Strategies LLC, a Washington DC-based consultancy focused on transmission and power markets for a reliable, affordable, and sustainable power system.  He co-founded Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies (WATT Coalition), Advancing Modern Powerlines (AMP Coalition), the Macro Grid Initiative, the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition, RENEW Northeast, and the Future Power Markets Forum. Rob and Grid Strategies have appeared recently as experts in national news stories in the Washington Post, Fox Business, New York Times, NPR, C-SPAN, and the Wall Street Journal. Rob was formerly SVP and Interim CEO, American Wind Energy Association, Economic Advisor to FERC Chairman Pat Wood III, and Senior Economist at PJM Interconnection LLC. Rob has a BA with honors in Economics from Colby College and a Master of Public Policy degree from UC Berkeley.

Dr. Jeffery Goldmeer

Dr. Jeffrey Goldmeer is a Senior Director of Technology Strategy within GE Vernova’s corporate Strategy & Innovation organization. His primary focus is leading cross business teams to deliver investment recommendations for a variety of technologies including hydrogen and e-fuels. Dr. Goldmeer is also co-creator and co-host of GE Vernova’s award-winning decarbonization podcast, Cutting Carbon, which has over 130,000 downloads in 155 countries.

Dr. Goldmeer is an expert on topics related to the energy transition as well as low carbon fuels and combustion. He led multiple first of a kind projects demonstrating operation of both aeroderivative and heavy-duty gas turbines on blends of hydrogen and natural gas.

Dr. Goldmeer has been invited to policy discussions, technical meetings, and webinars with multiple government, non-government policy/advocacy organizations, universities, and investment firms. These include the US Department of Energy, the US Department of State, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Business Council of Australia, Princeton University, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Bank of America, and multiple non-US energy ministries.

Prior to joining GE Vernova, Dr. Goldmeer was a Senior Research Scientist at Southwest Sciences, and a National Research Council Post-Doctorate Research Associate at NASA. Dr. Goldmeer holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Case Western Reserve University, and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has 13 patents, over 100 conference papers/presentations, and contributed to three recent books on hydrogen and renewable fuels.

Derek Stenclik

Derek Stenclik is a Founding Partner of Telos Energy, an analytics and engineering firm specializing in renewable integration, grid planning, and power system reliability. Mr. Stenclik is a recognized expert on wind, solar, and battery integration, resource adequacy, and power markets. Prior to founding Telos Energy, Derek spent eight years in GE Power’s Energy Consulting department as the Senior Manager of Power System Strategy and holds a master’s degree in Applied Economics from Cornell University.

Pavel Ozhogin

Pavel Ozhogin is a Director of Data Science at National Grid, where he leads a team that focuses on solving business problems through data-driven approaches. Pavel’s passion for finding actionable insights from data has led him to study and utilize statistics, predictive analytics, AI/machine learning, and process improvement. He applies all these techniques daily to support the transformational changes currently facing the utility industry. While analyzing satellite data and working on his Ph.D. dissertation in Atmospheric Physics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Pavel developed and validated a new model of electron densities in the Earth’s plasmasphere.

Dr. Nick BAssill

Dr. Nick Bassill is an atmospheric scientist with a background in numerical weather prediction, forecasting, data science/analysis, data visualization and a desire to apply those skills to emergency management and other public-sector uses of weather. His current position requires a significant amount of public outreach to organizations such as state agencies, utilities, educational entities, and others to engage them on how weather affects their operations and their stakeholders. In 2014, he joined the NYS Mesonet before they began deploying a $30M weather observing network. Afterward, Nick moved to the UAlbany Center of Excellence, where he conducted a series of research and product development projects with area utilities. Nick pushed for the creation of a publicly funded NY State Weather Risk Communication Center. This Center was successfully created in 2023, and Nick currently serves as the director while continuing his role at the Center of Excellence.

Bruce Bailey

Dr. Bruce Bailey began his career in the renewable energy field while working as a research associate at UAlbany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center. He then founded and led AWS Truepower, a meteorological and engineering consulting firm serving the renewables industry for over 30 years before the firm was acquired by UL. At UL, Bruce became the VP of Renewables. He has since retired from UL and remains active in the field, maintaining valuable interactions with UAlbany and industry.

 Dr. Bailey has also established an Endowed Fellowship at UAlbany that provides perpetual support for a doctoral fellow. The Followship encourages interdisciplinary research aimed at enabling effective deployment of renewable energy on the electric grid using innovative insights from the atmospheric sciences and other fields. Research will focus on topics such as: advanced resource assessment in a changing climate; large-scale integration of renewable energy on the grid; economic assessment of renewable energy deployments; renewable energy public policy and education; and energy infrastructure resiliency maximization.

Jan Woodcock

Jan is the Director of Operations for the NYS Weather and Climate Analytics Center of Excellence.  Mr. Woodcock has deep experience driving innovation and transformation in High Tech Industries.  He was a senior partner at Deloitte Consulting, Global Partner at Wipro Technologies, and Transformation Executive at Cognizant. His industry experience encompasses the Fortune 100, the small business sector, and Venture Funded start-ups. He specializes in the areas of strategy and operations, with experience spanning analytics, financial management, customer and product strategy, and digital transformation. His Reverse Innovation research paper drove a CEO panel at the Davos World Economic Forum.  

Jorge G0nzalez-Cruz

Before joining ASRC, Prof. González was the director of The CCNY Initiative to Promote Academic Success in STEM (CiPASS), lead scientist of the Coastal-Urban Environmental Research Group (CUERG), and The City College of New York Presidential Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY).

Professor González holds several patents in solar energy equipment, aerosol detection, and energy forecasting for buildings, and was recognized as a prominent young researcher by the National Science Foundation with a prestigious CAREER Award.  He has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, has delivered 100s of conference presentations, and his research has attracted more than $40M in external funding.

He is a Fellow Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), and Former Vice-Chairman of the American Meteorological Society Board on the Urban Environment.  He was appointed in 2015 by the Mayor of the City as Member of the Climate Change Panel for the City of New York, and more recently as Senior Visiting Scientist of the Beijing Institute of Urban Meteorology and of Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is the coeditor of the ASME Handbook of Integrated and Sustainable Buildings Equipment and Systems, and was named this year 2019 as the Founding Editor of the newest ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities. 

Richard Perez

Richard Perez holds a doctoral degree in atmospheric sciences from the State University of New York. After an extensive senior faculty tenure spearheading solar energy research at the University at Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, Richard Perez now serves as Consulting Scientist to the renewable energy industry, leading a multi-country task force focused on firm renewable power generation under the aegis of International Energy Agency.

Recognized with international accolades, including a US Department of Energy's Certificate for Outstanding Research and the American Solar Energy Society’s Charles Greeley Abbot Award, Perez continues to receive honors for his visionary contributions, include a Visionary Scientist Distinction from the Clean Tech Business Club, jointly with his son Marc with whom he actively collaborates at Clean Power Research, and a Solar Champion Award from the New York Solar Energy Industry Association, acknowledging his foundational research in advancing solar energy.

Christopher D. Thorncroft

My research is mainly focused on improving our understanding of the West African monsoon and how it impacts Atlantic tropical cyclone variability. The research spans a wide range of timescales from diurnal to multidecadal. At the weather scale, my research is focused on understanding the physical processed that impact the nature and variability of African easterly waves (AEWs). This includes a special emphasis on how AEWs interact with the ubiquitous mesoscale convective systems and ultimately how this affects the probability that AEWs will help spawn tropical cyclones. Recent work at the weather scale has also emphasized the role of convectively coupled equatorial waves on the West African monsoon and Atlantic tropical cyclogenesis frequency. At the climate scale, I am interested in better understanding the annual cycle of the West African monsoon as well as the processes that impact interannual to decadal variability and predictability of Sahel rainfall.

Jeff Freedman

As part of the Boundary Layer Meteorology and Renewable Energy Groups at ASRC, my main research focus is on renewable energy and atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) processes. This includes work on improving wind and solar power production forecasting, outage prediction modeling applications, developing instrumentation and improving modeling approaches for offshore wind energy, and using ASRC modeling and observational assets to better understand weather and climate influences on our renewable energy resource. A principal tool for my observational work is a Leosphere Windcube 100S scanning LiDAR. Of great value for my research is continuing collaboration with colleagues at ASRC, the New York State Mesonet, the Center of Excellence for Weather and Climate Analytics, and working with a very talented group of graduate students.

My previous work in the private sector (with Atmospheric Information Services and Envirolaw, companies I founded, and AWS Truepower, as Lead Research Scientist) included serving as a lead Principal Investigator for the first Wind Forecasting Improvement Project (WFIP), a three-year Department of Energy (DOE)/National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study to demonstrate the value of additional atmospheric observations and model enhancements on wind energy production forecasts, the development of the Solar Wind Integrated Forecast Tool (SWIFT), a state-of-the-art forecasting service for Hawaii´s electric utilities, and a LiDAR-based study of the 3D wind field over Cranberry Lake in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and developing an early roadmap for the legal and regulatory review of offshore wind energy projects in US coastal waters.

Elena Garuc

Elena Garuc is the Executive Director of FuzeHub, New York State’s premier organization championing the manufacturing and innovation ecosystem. For two decades, Elena has led the implementation of technology-led economic development initiatives resulting in private sector job growth and competitiveness gains. Elena leads FuzeHub’s operations and works closely with its Board of Directors to realize strategic goals. As a FuzeHub founder, she guided the organization from inception while growing its team to fourteen staff members and securing federal and state grants, including designation as the statewide New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) center. Before becoming Executive Director, Elena shaped FuzeHub’s marketing and brand strategy, and its nationally-recognized web-based portal and marketing programs.

Prior to her role at FuzeHub, Elena spent a decade as Director of Marketing at the Center for Economic Growth in Albany, and had the privilege of leading or supporting programs such as an upstate venture capital forum, a biotechnology network, and a technology roadmap portal.