Vijay Modi is a Professor in Columbia University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and also a member of the Earth Institute/Climate School and Data Sciences Faculty. He directs the Quadracci Sustainable Engineering Laboratory (QSEL). He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and worked as a post-doc at MIT from 1984 to 1986 before joining the faculty at Columbia University. Prof. Modi’s areas of expertise are energy resources and energy conversion technologies. His laboratory, QSEL, has been responsible for technologies such as “SharedSolar” and widely used tools such as “Network Planner” and a free open-source app called FormHub, used over a million times.
He has more than 30 years of experience in energy resources/conversion applied research, including thermal power generation, gas turbines, solar and wind technologies. In the last decade, his laboratory has carried out pioneering work in digital mini-grids that integrate electricity supply/demand monitoring, dynamic allocation of energy/power resources to individual customers and the use of IoT for system, battery, customer commercial account management with integration of communication and controls. His laboratory has developed network expansion tools for electric utilities in low-resource settings and data-driven analysis of such utilities for demand forecasting. His current research includes resource adequacy and capacity expansion models for deep decarbonization of the energy system, including data-driven models for electrification of heating and transport. Much of this effort involves modeling tools that aim to replicate the key features of the supply, demand, transmission, reserves, regulatory and market systems.