Thursday, 18 April 2019 - 1400 (EDT)/1800 (UTC)

Sustainable urbanization:  Establishing smart urban infrastructures

Speaker:  Dr. Mehdi Ganji - VP - Smart Cities, Willdan Energy Solutions

This webinar will discuss how a smart city is an urban center that integrates a variety of innovative solutions to improve infrastructural performances and achieve a sustainable urban development. The urban infrastructures in many cities suffer from a series of critical issues, including capacity insufficiency, functional deterioration and deferred maintenance, and technological obsolescence that place legacy infrastructures unprepared for providing better civil services and promoting a higher quality of life and socioeconomic competitiveness. In the future, the authors explain, a significant increase in urban population will place massive pressure on constrained city infrastructures (e.g., public and private transportation and mobility), pose various types of concerns for peoples’ lives, and, potentially, lead to significant economic losses and lack of preparedness in critical and disastrous circumstances. The adoption of smart city solutions represents a key factor in the consumption of resources for improving the efficiency of services and meeting individual citizens’ needs as urban populations grow and resources become scarcer

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About the Speaker Mehdi Ganji Mehdi Ganji leads Willdan’s Smart Cities Team, expanding the knowledge of smart grid technology across the company—with emphasis on power system grid resiliency, reliability improvement, and smart grid technologies. Dr. Ganji has been the Principal Investigator (PI) of a number of microgrid projects in the State of New York (NY PRIZE), Massachusetts, and California. Currently, he is leading the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) Smart Campus project in Turkey. As an executive consultant to Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, he has worked on more than 30 smart grid research and implementation projects focused on the development of microgrid planning and operation applications for different market segments, and identification of the various microgrid business models. His areas of interest include energy markets, data analytics and its role in Smart Cities applications, electric vehicle integration, transactive energy, and energy management systems. He has been actively engaged in several technical and industrial working groups such as IEEE 2030.7&8 and the State of California Microgrid Commercialization Roadmap. Dr. Ganji is the IEEE Smart City R&D Committee Chair.

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