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Topics:  Public Policy, Physics, Energy, Risk Analysis, Engineering

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Jay Apt is an emeritus professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and in the CMU Department of Engineering and Public Policy. He has authored more than 120 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as two books and several book chapters. He has published opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Apt received an A.B. in physics from Harvard College in 1971 and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the Electric Power Research Institute Board of Directors from 2007 through 2013. He received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and the Metcalf Lifetime Achievement Award for significant contributions to engineering.

Media Experience

U.S. natural gas pipelines vulnerable to electric outages  — CMU Engineering
“In contrast to well-established reliability reporting and standards for the electrical system, the gas system has almost no reliability transparency or oversight,” says study co-author Jay Apt, an emeritus professor of engineering and public policy and business. “Establishing a federal gas reliability organization, comparable to what is now done for electric power, could improve gas reliability by establishing appropriate reliability reporting, incident investigation, and minimum industry standards.”

An urgent plan to decarbonize electricity by 2035  — The Hill
We applaud the Biden administration’s goal of completely decarbonizing the U.S. electricity system by 2035. Achieving that, while keeping power affordable and reliable, will be an enormous but feasible undertaking requiring a continuous push for the next 14 years.

The House That Launched an Astronaut’s Career  — The Wall Street Journal
EPP’s Jay Apt was interviewed for a story in The Wall Street Journal featuring his family’s historic home in Pittsburgh, which is on the market for the first time since it was built for his family in the 1950s.

‘The Current War: Director’s Cut’ shows how the electric power system we take for granted came to be  — The Conversation
Many experts view the electric power grid as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. But if Thomas Edison, inventor of the first commercial power plant, had had his way, the modern grid would not have been built. Instead the U.S. would have been powered by numerous coal-burning power plants, spaced a mile or so apart, with no electricity at all in rural areas.

Microbursts in Cleveland Heights unexplainable, but power outages are on the rise  — Cleveland.com
It’s impossible to completely make a power grid impervious to severe storm damage, Carnegie Mellon University professor Jay Apt said. “It is simply not possible to ensure that the power grid can withstand any weather event,” Apt said. “You can make things pretty good, but making them invulnerable is a fool’s errand."