Ron Ambrosio, Global Research Leader, Energy & Utilities Industry, IBM Research

Ron Ambrosio

What makes him powerful: Aside from having 30 years of experience working in energy, Ambrosio has made countless contributions to the industry. Over the past decade, his focus has been twofold: The utility industry and IBM.

As a charter member of the GridWise Architecture Council, Ambrosio helped to identify and communicate issues related to smart grid interoperability and later defined and launched the GridWise Alliance industry consortium as part of the initial eight-person planning team.

Beginning in January of 2008 and working closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Ambrosio helped start their coordination-role assignment in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) legislation and now serves as Chairman of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Architecture Committee.

Ambrosio has also served as the International Convenor of the ISO/IEC JTC 1 Special Working Group on Smart Grid, which advises JTC 1 on its smart grid standards activities and strategy, and coordinates with the other major international and regional standards bodies and organizations.

After concluding that the utility industry was going to be deeply influenced by the increasing capabilities of communications technology and its impact on control systems and sensor networks, Ambrosio made his mark as a key player in IBM's smart grid activities in the mid-2000s.

At the same time, Moore's Law continued to dictate improvements in the cost-performance ratio of these technologies, opening up the opportunity to re-think IBM's approach to electric grid systems and the devices and systems they supply.  A few months later, Ambrosio began collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Electricity and several National Laboratories, including Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State.

Ambrosio's research activities positioned IBM to enter the smart grid space several years earlier than it might have otherwise.  In parallel with his early industry and government collaboration, he also contributed to the smart grid dialog inside IBM, helping define the role IBM could play and determining why its capabilities and products would not only be relevant, but critical to the smart grid. Ambrosio knew IBM was poised to make an impact, especially since smart grids represent a blending of traditional power systems technology with advanced information technology to support rich modeling, analytics and optimization in a highly dynamic and distributed system of systems environment. 

His research efforts have had a practical impact in such projects as the GridWise Olympic Peninsula Project (2005 to 2007) and, more recently, in the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration (2010 to 2015). He has also been long-time partners with Pacific Northwest National Lab, Bonneville Power Administration, ALSTOM Grid and others, working to develop new approaches to managing electric systems and electricity delivery through techniques like Transactive Energy Management.

Ambrosio predicts that the future will be even more impactful than the past.

"The most important impacts are still to come as we begin to see more and more advanced energy systems deployed and, more importantly, as we begin to effectively integrate them to take advantage of the system-wide optimizations that have been my objective from the very beginning," he said.

All of these experiences have allowed Ambrosio to continually share his perspective and vision about energy system transformation in support of greater amounts of distributed energy resources, and to apply his background in systems architecture, embedded real-time operating systems, control systems, enterprise computing and highly distributed computing environments.