July 30: ChargeCar event with Jay Apt

The ChargeCar Project thanks Councilman Bill Peduto and everyone else who came to share and listen at last week's open house and forum. We are very excited to move forward with everyone's great ideas! If you couldn't make it, our last event of the summer is this Friday.

We would like to invite you to our final community event and cookout of the summer on Friday, July 30th at 7pm, at the Electric Garage where we will be hosting a public policy community day. In addition to invited members and representatives from local government and Pittsburgh's Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP), CMU professor and former NASA astronaut Jay Apt (see biography below) will be giving a presentation on the electric grid. Professor Apt will begin at 8:30pm.

To stay up to date on all things ChargeCar, please visit www.chargecar.org and join our forum and mailing list.

Jay Apt is Professor of Technology at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy. He is the Executive Director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. He received an A.B .in physics from Harvard College in 1971 and a Ph.D. in experimental atomic physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976.

His research and teaching interests are in economics, engineering, and public policy aspects of the electricity industry, economics of technical innovation, management of technical enterprises, risk management in policy and technical decision framing, and engineering systems design.

Recent publications include, "The Variability of Interconnected Wind Plants", "The Economics of Using PHEV Battery Packs for Grid Storage ", "The Character of Power Output from Utility-Scale Photovoltaic Systems", "Air Emissions Due To Wind And Solar Power", "The Geoengineering Option: A Last Resort Against Global Warming? ", "Promoting Low-Carbon Electricity Production", "Storing Syngas Lowers the Carbon Price for Profitable Coal Gasification", "The Spectrum of Power from Wind Turbines", "The Character of Power Output from Utility-Scale PV Systems", "Should a Coal-Fired Power Plant be Retrofitted or Replaced?", "Economics of Electric Energy Storage for Energy Arbitrage and Regulation in New York", "Power and People", "Deregulation Has Not Lowered US Industrial Electricity Prices", and "Electrical Blackouts: A Systemic Problem."

He has co-authored with Lester Lave op-ed pieces for the New York Times and the Washington Post. A former NASA Astronaut, he flew four missions aboard the U.S. Space Shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour. He received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1997 and the Metcalf Lifetime Achievement Award for significant contributions to engineering in 2002. His paper with PhD student Adam Newcomer, "Near term implications of a ban on new coal-fired power plants in the US" was cited as one of the top environmental policy papers of 2009 by the American Chemical Society.

ChargeCar's Electric Garage is located at the former Exxon Gas Station on the 4600 block of Forbes Avenue, next to CMU.

A map of the area can be found here.