CCAE Expands Climate Week Programming with New IEEE Partnership

The Columbia Center for Advanced Electrification (CCAE) expanded its presence at Columbia Engineering's Climate Week this year with three days of programming that connected experts across academia, industry, government, and the energy sector.

This year marked several firsts for CCAE, including an expanded three-day program and a new partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for the inaugural IEEE/CCAE Symposium on Advanced Electrification Systems (SAES2026).

The week began Wednesday with the Sustainable Energy Catalyst Roundtables, co-hosted with Energy One Solutions at the Innovation Hub. About 50 participants joined six roundtable discussions on topics including grid digitalization, energy storage, and transition finance. Participants included representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), Con Edison, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), and a five-person delegation from the Consulate General of Canada.

The programming continued Thursday and Friday at Columbia with SAES2026, which focused this year on energy storage systems and their role in building more resilient, efficient, and sustainable energy infrastructure. The symposium was designed to foster collaboration among researchers, industry practitioners, and policymakers working across transportation, power grids, and digital infrastructure, with particular attention to system integration, modeling, control, safety, and sustainability. 

Thursday featured an IEEE industry workshop with MathWorks on simulation for renewable energy and storage systems and Viridi on battery energy storage deployment for urban and institutional infrastructure. The day concluded with an information event featuring Tau Motors. 

On Friday, Columbia Vice Dean for Research George Deodatis joined CCAE Director and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Matthias Preindl to open the symposium. Invited speakers represented organizations including GM Energy, Siemens, Exelon and Epic Star Energy, addressing topics ranging from grid resilience and distributed energy storage to EV-connected grid solutions. 

The program also included a fireside chat with Wesley Pennington, founder and CEO of Tau Motors, followed by technical sessions examining power converters, battery systems, grid-forming inverters, electric vehicle charging, second-life batteries, solar adoption, and AI-based lithium-ion battery modeling. A major outcome of the new IEEE partnership was a collection of 45 technical papers, which will be published through IEEE Xplore, extending the symposium's research contributions beyond the event itself.

"Vehicles and buildings are electrifying at the same moment AI is adding data centers, and underneath they are converging on the same family of hardware: the electronics that fast-charge a car are a close cousin of the ones that feed a server hall," said Preindl in a message reflecting on the week. "The hard part isn't how much electricity we need. It's when we need it. Batteries hold the energy, power electronics control the rate and provide grid services, and together they can integrate difficult loads into a predictable system."

IEEE has already committed to an expanded two-day IEEE/CCAE SAES in 2027, with planning underway. The 2026 symposium was organized by CCAE and IEEE and supported by CCAE, Tau Motors and the IEEE Transportation Electrification Council.