Richard O'Neill Retires

November 30, 2023

Richard O'Neill, National Academy of Engineering member and former Chief Economist at FERC, who became the GO Competition ARPA-E Program Director on November 25, 2019, retired today after 4 years of dedicated service to the Competition. The idea for the Competition emerged out of O'Neill's ideas put forth at the FERC Software Conferences.

O’Neill initiated the series of annual FERC Technical Conference on Increasing Market and Planning Efficiency through Improved Software (FERC Software Conference) held at the FERC building in Washington, DC, in 2008, but there seems to be no on-line records until 2010, when there were 8 talks about AC Optimal Power Flow. Many of the people eventually involved, either as competitors or members of the support team, participated as early as 2011, when O’Neill and collaborators began a series of talks on Computational Approaches to the AC Optimal Power Flow (OPF) Problem. Other presentations in 2011 by Competition related individuals included Rothberg (Gurobi) and Bienstock (Columbia). The 2012 Conference had 7 Competition presenters and 2013 had 6. 2013 saw the release of 11 Optimal Power Flow and Formulation Papers by O’Neill et al. and discussions of how much of the $400 billion in energy sector revenues could be saved with improved optimization algorithms. O’Neill, noting that the transition from Lagrangians to Unit Commitment in the early 2000s saved approximately $30 billion, estimated better optimization algorithsm could save $10 billion. Tim Heidel told Steve Elbert he didn’t think it was that much. The 2014 Conference saw 6 presentations by Competition people with two more by O’Neill collaborators. Heidel told Elbert at this meeting that $10 billion probably was reasonable and on October 6, 2014 sent out invitations to the Advanced Bulk Power System Optimization Technologies Workshop in Arlington, VA, November 13-14, 2014. Heidel said he was motivated by discussions with O’Neill about the improved impact of optimization on the efficiency of the electric grid and by queries from Congressional staffers about why ARPA-E was not holding competitions like DARPA. The goal of the Competition would be to improve the state-of-the-art optimizers for Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) and in general increase the efficiency of the North American Power Grid. Slide 12 from Heidel’s presentation indicates $11.5-$23 billion in savings per year are possible from faster, more robust OPF.