EPRI
Neva Espinoza is the Director for Research and Development at the Electric Power Research Institute.
PUF brings you a taste of the Electrification Virtual Summit, with excerpts from plenary sessions held each day. But first PUF talks to a rising star at EPRI, Neva Espinoza, who knows so much about electrification and decarbonization that we are sure you will be seeing more of her in these pages.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: You are one of the leaders of the Electrification Virtual Conference and you headed one of the key sessions. Why was that such an important session?
Neva Espinoza: The session I led during the Electrification Conference is called Going the Last Mile: Decarbonizing Our Heavy Industry. What we've seen, and what we continue to see, is so much success and a lot of investment in the electrification of transportation, and electrification of buildings, both commercial and residential.
Looking at the overall decarbonization picture, at deep decarbonization economy-wide, which means greater than eighty percent decarbonization across the economy, about three percent of end-use applications are not necessarily suited for what we're calling direct electrification.
Those are things like shipping, heavy industry, petrochemical, and even our gas turbine fleets. Our gas turbine fleet provides a huge amount of power to our grid today. Natural gas is a huge contributor.