Lorenzo Kristov
Electric System Policy
Principal
Lorenzo Kristov is an independent energy policy expert working on electric power system transition to renewable generation and distributed energy resources (DER), and to empower communities and local governments to adopt local power systems for resilience, decolonization, and energy justice. Urgent environmental and social equity challenges, solvable with rapid advances in clean energy technologies and yet hampered by obsolete regulatory and business models, demand a policy approach that views regulation, markets, grid operations, planning, and customer choice as elements of a whole system. After 18 years as a Principal in market design and infrastructure policy at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), Lorenzo’s expertise includes: wholesale power market design; DER participation in wholesale markets; coordination of transmission and distribution operations, markets and planning; distribution system operator (DSO) models; distribution-level transactional markets; energy resilience and microgrids; and grid architecture. At the CAISO from 1999 through 2017 Lorenzo led cross-functional teams and stakeholder initiatives to enhance CAISO’s market and planning functions and better integrate markets with grid operations. He was a lead designer of the nodal pricing market system implemented in 2009. He later led teams to redesign transmission planning and generator interconnection to enable rapid growth of renewable energy and storage projects. In 2013 he began working to integrate DERs into the CAISO market and formulate strategies for T-D interface coordination with the distribution utilities. He has written widely cited papers, consulted with international clients, and participated in national and international forums on power system evolution, DSO models, local energy planning and grid architecture. Prior to joining the CAISO Lorenzo was Energy Economist at the California Energy Commission (1995-9) and Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia (1993-4). He has a BS in Mathematics from Manhattan College, MS in Statistics from North Carolina State University, and PhD in Economics from the University of California Davis.
