Speakers

Hadi Athari is Director of Energy Technology at Simple Thread, where he leads the development of Minerva Interconnect™, a next-generation SaaS platform for automating generation interconnection studies. He also established and now leads the company’s Energy Technology team, an interdisciplinary group dedicated to helping electrical engineers navigate the complexities of reliability and interconnection studies through innovative software solutions.

With a background that spans transmission planning at Dominion Energy, interconnection study automation at Urban Grid, and software leadership at Simple Thread, Hadi bridges the gap between power system engineering and modern software development. His work focuses on using automation, AI, and transparent modeling to accelerate interconnection studies, improve queue efficiency, and give developers and utilities better tools for planning the grid of the future.

He has presented at various IEEE and CIGRE industry forums and has published widely on grid resilience, cascading failures, and interconnection cost analysis. Hadi holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University and is a licensed Professional Engineer.