Dr. Alex Papalexopoulos

Dr. Alex Papalexopoulos (M’80–SM’85–F’01) is an international energy expert and an authority in energy market design and implementation. He is the CEO and founder of ECCO International, a specialized energy consulting and software company which provides consulting and software services worldwide to a wide range of clients such as Governments, Utilities, Independent System Operators, Power Exchanges, Regulators, Marketers, Brokers and Software vendors. These services range from strategic planning, wholesale and retail energy market design and IT implementation, trading, market optimization studies, system operations and planning, generation, transmission and distribution projects. Over the last 25 years Dr. Papalexopoulos has designed some of the most complex energy markets in the world including North, Central and South America, Western and Eastern Europe and Asia. 

Since 2012 Dr. Alex Papalexopoulos is also CEO and Chairman of the Board of ZOME Energy Networks, a DER software optimization company which specializes in the development and commercialization of smart grid technologies to enable the decarbonization of the energy sector. The company is currently implementing Energy Management Programs for the mass residential and commercial market and has 14 patents. In 2019 ZOME received the top award in the “smart city” category at the Consumer Electronic Show. Next year ZOME will issue a cryptocurrency token to enable Pier-to-Pier transactions to enable the transition of the current energy systems to an transactive energy future.

Prior to forming ECCO International in 1998, Dr. Papalexopoulos was a director of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s Electric Industry Restructuring Group in San Francisco, California. He received the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. He has published more than 150 papers in refereed scientific journals and conferences and has given numerous invited presentations in leading institutions in the U.S. and around the world. He has organized and trained various organizations in the area of energy market design and chaired numerous panels and special sessions in IEEE. He is the 1992 recipient of PG&E’s Wall of Fame Award, the 1996 recipient of IEEE’s PES First Prize Paper Award and a Fellow of IEEE. In 2016 he was bestowed the award of the honorary Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Patras, Greece.