Columbia University

Public power utility leaders meet with experts in technology, energy, and policy. Attendance is limited to facilitate productive dialogue. Sessions address shifts in the global energy landscape, including the energy transition, energy security, geopolitical and economic competition, and investment in energy infrastructure, renewable technologies, nuclear power, and fossil fuels. Other discussions examine reliability and affordability amid growing demand, rising costs, regulatory pressures, and customer expectations; resource adequacy, infrastructure investment, workforce challenges, supply-chain constraints, and emerging technologies; and leadership through outages, cyber incidents, severe weather, safety emergencies, and public scrutiny. The program also explores AI and other emerging technologies, including their utility applications and questions around governance, cybersecurity, workforce impacts, and risk management. Additional topics include evaluating and integrating significant new loads, generation and infrastructure investments, contracts and rate protections, aligning economic development with the public power mission, and workforce development, succession planning, leadership training, and knowledge transfer.

Under the theme “Chemical Engineering Reimagined,” the meeting covers chemical-engineering research, technologies, and emerging growth areas. Program guides highlight AI and machine learning, climate change, industrial careers, and early-career faculty. The AI and machine-learning program includes sessions on process development; polymer simulation, informatics, and data analytics; data-driven pharmaceutical process controls; AI-enabled process design, scale-up, and workforce readiness; nuclear chemical engineering; manufacturing-system modeling; computational catalysis; digital twins in energy systems; biomass utilization; and data-driven medicine. Featured discussions consider digital transformation, evolving industrial ecosystems, sustainability pressures, and changing workforce expectations, as well as ways to incorporate data science into chemical-engineering curricula, degree programs, certificates, and teaching of statistics and programming. Featured lectures address chemical engineers’ roles amid advances in AI, sustainable energy, and an interconnected global economy, and the use of catalysis to convert biomass, CO2, and end-of-life polymers into fuels, chemicals, and materials. Other lecture themes include carbon circularity, process intensification, renewable hydrogen, and pathways toward net-negative carbon manufacturing.