Ignacio J. Pérez Arriaga

Currently he is Principal Investigator of the Comillas University - Massachusetts Institute of Technology Electricity Systems Program Archived 2014-01-03 at the Wayback Machine. He was the principal investigator of the MIT Utility of the Future study, published in 2016.

He carried on with the seminal works of his mentor Prof. Schweppe on marginal pricing theories applied to power systems; on the generation side, he formulated the foundation for wholesale pricing considering generation operation and planning constraints and identifying the reasons for mismatches in capital cost recovery with marginal generation prices. On the transmission side, he demonstrated why marginal prices fail to recover the total incurred network costs. Later on, he added major contributions to the security of supply debate, formulating in the context of the redesign of the Colombian capacity payments mechanism in 1999 the reliability options mechanism, the base of the capacity auction mechanisms later implemented in Colombia and New England. He has also worked intensively on the regulatory design of regional markets (both in Central America and in European Union) as well as on end-user tariff design. In 2013 he edited the book “Regulation of the Power Sector” (Springer-Verlag), used as textbook in his MIT course as well as in the annual training program for energy regulators of the Florence School of Regulation of the European University Institute.

In the early 1990s, in the context of the Argentinean power sector restructuring, he began working on the analysis of the best regulatory methodologies for pricing power transmission services, formulating the principle of beneficiary pays for network cost allocation. Since then, he has devoted a major part of his research activities to the regulation and restructuring of the power industry.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his research was focused on the development of new algorithms and methodologies to support the operation and planning of electric power systems. Among other contributions, he developed pioneering models for computation of spot prices in interconnected power systems and decomposition approaches to tackle optimal reactive power planning problems. During this period he also contributed to computer-aided optimization design of electrical machines and other industrial equipment and to the development of expert systems with applications to the design and incipient default detection in industrial systems.

Pérez-Arriaga was born in Madrid and went on to graduate as Electrical Engineer from the ICAI School of Engineering. He earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1981 respectively. After completing his Ph.D., Pérez-Arriaga became professor at the ICAI School of Engineering. In 1984 he founded the Institute for Research in Technology (IIT) at Comillas Pontifical University, being its Director until 1994. Since 2009 he rejoined the MIT (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department), where among other activities he teaches the graduate course “Engineering, Economics and Regulation of the Electric Power Sector”. He is also Director of Training at the Florence School of Regulation European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Beyond his role as professor, he has played an active role in the liberalization process of the electric power sector, not only in the implementation of the European Internal Market for Electricity, being one of the precursors of the Electricity Regulatory Forum (Florence) of the European Commission but also in the Latin American context (President of the Advisory Council of the Central American Electricity Market until 2005). He served as Commissioner in the Spanish Electricity Regulatory Commission (1995-2000) and later as Independent Member of the Single Electricity Market Committee of Ireland (2007-2012). Currently he is Member of the Board of Appeal of the Agency for the Coordination of Energy Regulators (ACER) in the EU, and Review Editor of the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has also rendered consultant services for governments and regulatory authorities, international institutions, industrial associations and utilities in over 30 countries.

Ignacio J. Pérez Arriaga (Madrid, 23 June 1948) is a Spanish professor of Engineering, Economics and Regulation of the Electric Power Sector, currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, United States) and the ICAI School of Engineering (Comillas Pontifical University, Spain). He is a life member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain. He has been a major contributor across the spectrum of electric power systems, from system dynamic analysis, monitoring and diagnosis at the start of his academic career, to economic and regulatory analysis.