Mary Ann Piette

Berkeley, CA, USA — Research Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Mary Ann Piette is a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Director of LBNL’s Demand Response Research Center (DRRC).  The DRRC was established in 2004 to plan, manage, conduct and disseminate research for the California Energy Commission on demand response (DR) link to demand response article in Smart Grid/Building section], which entails reductions in electricity usage to match the real-time grid conditions – an important piece of the smart grid vision.
 

Piette has been at LBNL since 1983 and has extensive experience evaluating the performance of energy efficiency and demand response in large facilities. She has authored about 100 papers on energy efficiency and demand response.  As head of the DRRC, she directs research to link energy efficiency and DR technologies, practices, and strategies. Piette led the first pilot deployment of Automated Demand Response in California, demonstrating complete end-to-end automation of demand response, from grid operators’ signals calling for load reductions to the actions of building control systems to curtail usage. Piette has been instrumental in the development of and advocacy for Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR), a technical communications protocol that makes grid-to-building communication a key piece of the smart grid.  In addition to her work demonstrating smart grid technology and promoting supportive policies, Piette and her DRRC group have led the way in multi-disciplinary behavioral research about the interaction between humans and the smart grid.

In 2006, Piette received the Benner Award at the National Conference on Building Commissioning for contributions to making building commissioning "business as usual.”