Andres Carvallo, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Proximetry; Co-author of "The Advanced Smart Grid"

Andres Carvallo

What makes him powerful: Carvallo is a "smart grid" pioneer, defining the term on March 5, 2004 at Austin Energy and building the first smart grid in the United States while at Austin Energy by 2009.

Carvallo joined Austin Energy in February of 2003 as Chief Information Officer to lead a technological transformation that started with a smart metering project, and the deployment of an enterprise architecture and customer portals for one third of Austin Energy's customers. After reading EPRI's Intelligrid whitepaper and IBM's Intelligent Utility Network whitepaper in late 2003, Carvallo decided to use the free term "smart grid" to define the effort at Austin Energy for making the utility grid, buildings, homes, electric vehicles all one integrated grid managing two-way power and data flows.

There were many firsts under Carvallo at Austin Energy from 2003 to 2010.  On January 3, 2008, auditors from the National Standards Authority of Ireland (NASI), the worldwide entity that administers the ISO quality management program, issued the ISO 9001 registration to Austin Energy, marking the first time a U.S. electric utility had achieved the standard.

By December of 2008, with an understanding that its smart grid was almost complete, the Austin Energy executive team agreed to expand its smart grid vision and founded the Pecan Street Project, which Carvallo led as its Chief Technology Officer.  The Pecan Street Project was created to secure DOE funding and become the first smart grid living lab where private and public sectors could experiment with new smart grid technologies being used by residential and commercial customers.

By December of 2009, Carvallo had replaced every system and integrated them via the first Energy Service Oriented Architecture enabling the first integrated smart grid in the United States, covering 100 percent of its service territory. 

In July of 2010, Carvallo co-authored a book titled, "The Advanced Smart Grid" which has been heralded as the go-to guide for the smart grid. Placing emphasis on practical "how-to" guidance, this cutting-edge resource provides a first-hand, insider's perspective on the advent and evolution of smart grids in the 21st century (smart grid 1.0). This forward-looking volume explores the next step of technology's evolution, and provides a detailed explanation of how an advanced smart grid incorporates demand response with smart appliances and management mechanisms for distributed generation, energy storage, and electric vehicles.

The Advanced Smart Grid uses the design and construction of the first citywide smart grid in the US as a case study, sharing the many successes and lessons learned, providing working knowledge of successful tools and best practices to overcome diverse technological and organizational challenges of building a next-generation advanced smart grid (smart grid 2.0). A forward look offers a glimpse of interconnected advanced smart grids and a redesigned energy ecosystem (smart grid 3.0).

Carvallo continues his drive toward deploying a smart grid at every electric utility in the world via public speaking, writing and his leadership role at Proximetry.