Dr. Alex Papalexopoulos Dr. Alex Papalexopoulos is an internationally known energy expert and President, CEO and founder of ECCO International, a specialized Energy Consulting Company, which provides consulting and software services worldwide to a wide range of clients such as Governments, Regulators, Utilities, Independent System Operators, Generators, Marketers, Traders and Software vendors. These services are in the areas of industry restructuring, public policy analysis, power trading, energy market design, market system implementation, competitive bidding, smart grid and renewable energy, power systems operations, power generation, transmission planning, system dynamics and real time control. Further, ECCO International provides extensive software services in the areas of energy market simulations, energy market forecasting, renewable energy integration, and revenue and investment analysis using its advanced and proprietary optimization software platform. Dr. Alex Papalexopoulos has designed some of the most complex power markets in the world including North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe and Asia. He was the key designer of the power market in California. Most recently he was the key designer of the reform of the power market in Greece and its harmonization with the EU power markets. He was also a key consultant to the Power Public Corporation in Greece for the implementation of the reforms of the energy sector in Greece pursued by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Dr. Papalexopoulos has made substantial contributions in the areas of network grid optimization, power market design, transmission pricing and real time control functions. He has published more than 100 hundred papers in refereed scientific journals and conferences and has given numerous invited presentations in leading institutions. He has organized and trained various organizations in the area of power market design and chaired numerous panels and special sessions in IEEE. He is the 1992 recipient of PG&E's Wall of Fame Award, and the 1996 recipient of IEEE’s First Prize Paper Award. Dr. Papalexopoulos is a Fellow of IEEE. Dr. Papalexopoulos received the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. Alex is also an active investor in clean tech startups in Silicon Valley. Among his latest seed-investment activities, he is an investor, CEO and Chairman of the Board of ZOME Energy Networks, an energy software company which specializes in the research, development and commercialization of smart grid and demand response management technologies.
Policy initiatives worldwide for sustainable development and security of supply coupled with technological developments over the last five years have created new requirements for power market structures to meet the challenges of our times. In this presentation I address the organization of the wholesale markets for power taking into account the temporal and stochastic variability of demands and supplies, accentuated by the non-storability of power, multiple technologies and dependence on a reliable and secure transmission system. I focus on the challenges of the next generation of power market design structures that deal with sustainable development, the inter-play of gas and power markets, security of supply, smart grids, renewable generation and demand response.