DR JARRAD G. WRIGHT
Jarrad WRIGHT is a researcher in the Grid Planning and Analysis Center (GPAC) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. Jarrad predominantly works in improving the understanding of power system integration across generation, transmission and distribution. He is a qualified electrical engineer with a Ph.D. from WITS University in South Africa and has over 13 years of industry experience in the private and public sector. He is also a member of CIGRE and IEEE actively contributing to CIGRE working groups and was the national representative for South Africa in Study Committee C5 (electricity markets and regulation) from 2016-2022. He has extensive energy sector experience in 11 African countries predominantly involved energy systems operations and planning, sector-coupling, system stability, network planning, resource forecasting, storage and enabling market arrangements. Between 2014 and 2015, Jarrad established a presence of Energy Exemplar (the developer and distributor of PLEXOS) on the African continent as a Regional Manager. He was based at the CSIR Energy Centre in Pretoria, South Africa between 2015-2021 as a Principal Engineer and was a Commissioner on the South African National Planning Commission (NPC) as appointed by the President of South Africa.