EERE Undersecretary Visit

Dr. Colin McCormick visited Argonne on March 11-12th. From his personal Bio: “He is the Senior Advisor for Research & Development in the Office of the Under Secretary at the US Department of Energy.  His portfolio includes R&D strategy and coordination across the applied energy offices, including efficiency & renewables, grid technologies, fossil energy, and nuclear energy (EERE, OE, FE, NE).  He also supports R&D coordination among the applied energy offices, the Office of Science, and ARPA-E.  He previously served as the Team Lead for Emerging Technologies in the Building Technologies Program of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).”

Victor Zavala presented Argonne’s work on optimization under uncertainty and high-performance computing funded by Office of Science and discussed several connections with applied offices such as EERE and OE. Of particular interest to Dr. McCormick were applications of Gaussian process modeling for data analysis and uncertainty quantification of energy demands in building and urban systems and stochastic optimization for power grid operations. Victor also briefly described the mission and activities of M2ACS and how this is connected with existing activities.