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NEW! Jay Apt and Lester Lave discuss CEIC in this short video

The electricity industry in the United States accounts for $250 billion in sales, and demand for electricity is increasing. The industry faces issues which make meeting that demand difficult. These issues include slow rates of technology adoption, a transmission system designed for an earlier era, a hybrid of regulated and deregulated jurisdictions, and incomplete markets.

The problems of the electricity industry are inherently interdisciplinary, and the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center (CEIC) has merged engineering, economics, risk analysis, decision science to study problems such as these current areas of research:

  • Electricity Markets and Investment
  • Distributed Energy Resources
  • Advanced Generation, Transmission, and Environmental Issues
  • Reliability and Security of the Electricity Infrastructure
  • Demand Estimation and Demand Response 

CEIC's current research programs 

A brief PowerPoint description of CEIC

Recent publications illustrate the interdisciplinary character of the CEIC research: 

Electricity Generation: Can It be Sufficient and Green? 
Cascading Failures: Survival vs. Prevention 
Electric Gridlock: A National Solution 
Designing an Interdisciplinary Curriculum for the Changing Electric Power Industry 
Improving Energy Infrastructure Security: Costs and Consequences 
Probabilistic Risk Analysis and Electricity Project Capital Structures 
A Multi-Channel Stakeholder Consultation Process for Energy Deregulation 

CEIC's publications

The Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center (CEIC) was established in August 2001 after an extended competition sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among a number of U.S. research universities. It is one of 20 centers of excellence in different industries that the Sloan Foundation has established at 13 universities. Sloan explains that it has funded these centers in order to:

"…create an academic community that understands industries and to encourage a direct approach to the companies and people of each industry for data and observations. We believe observation-based work by well informed academics will, in the long run, lead to practical contributions to the industries studied."

Additional information on the Sloan industry centers is available at the Sloan Foundation's web site.

Under the direction of Lester Lave and Granger Morgan, CEIC focuses on long-term, strategic issues. As executive director, Jay Apt is responsible for the operation of CEIC.

CEIC's core funding comes jointly from Sloan and from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Core funding is renewable in two stages for an additional six years. Additional support has come from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, McDermott Technology, the ABB Group, Alliant Energy, National Rural Electrical Cooperative Association, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Office of Energy and Technology Development..

In building CEIC we have been careful to interpret the "electricity industry" to mean all the important stakeholders including private and public companies, cooperatives, labor, regulators, manufacturers and marketers of equipment and appliances, the service and consulting communities, the research communities, all classes of consumers, and state and national regulators. This breadth is reflected in the make-up of the Center's advisory board, the current members of which are listed on our People page.

CEIC's primary mission is to work with industry, government and other stakeholders to address the strategic problems of the electricity industry. In doing so, CEIC will produce a cadre of well-trained researchers, most of whom will continue to address the industry's problems during their subsequent professional careers. Fourteen faculty and eighteen Ph.D. students are now conducting research within CEIC. We have also involved a number of MBA, MS and BA/BS students. In addition to doctoral education, CEIC has a broad educational mission which includes the development of university courses, special topic short-courses, curricular advice for training programs, and similar activities. At the second meeting of our external advisory committee, in October 2002, one of the members of the committee noted that this makes CEIC probably the largest research effort in the world focused on interdisciplinary problems of the electricity industry.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Jay Apt    
Posner 254B
Tepper School of Business  
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA  15213-3890  
email: apt@cmu.edu  
Telephone: 412-268-3003
Fax: 412-268-7357