Tommy Vitolo performs consulting, conducts research, and assists in writing testimony and reports on a wide range of issues related to electric utilities, energy efficiency, electricity transmission and generation, consumer advocacy, environmental policy and compliance, and air emissions. His project work at Synapse focuses on issues of electric resource planning, avoided costs and emissions, modeling and statistical analysis, renewable electricity generation and integration, deregulated wholesale electricity market mechanics and pricing, and environmental policy and regulation.

Dr. Vitolo's recent work includes:

• Building a spreadsheet tool for the Global Environment Facility to estimate greenhouse gas reduction benefits for a broad range of proposed energy efficiency projects (e.g., standards and labeling, building codes, demonstrations and diffusion, and financial instruments)


• Developing a spreadsheet-based hourly dispatch model to test the capability of specified clean-energy scenarios in ten study regions to meet hourly demand in 2030 and 2050 (The specified scenarios phased out coal-fired electricity by 2050, and included high penetrations of energy efficiency and intermittent resources such as solar and wind.)


• Co-authoring Potential Impacts of a Renewable and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard in Kentucky, a report prepared for the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development and The Kentucky Sustainable Energy Alliance

Before joining Synapse, Dr. Vitolo was a research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, where he designed algorithms and implemented software to create topologies for aerial, land-based, and nautical vehicles. His academic work focused on optimizing physical and financial systems through quantitative analysis, linear programming, and other methods.

Dr. Vitolo holds a PhD in systems engineering from Boston University; an MS in financial and industrial mathematics from Dublin City University, Ireland; and bachelor's degrees in applied mathematics, computer science, and economics from North Carolina State University.