People

Mr Bai K. Blyden is CEO and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of the BBRM Group. Over his 40-year professional career, he has contributed his expertise to more than forty major and minor power plant projects and their associated interconnections around the world. This has involved detailed power plant and transmission systems design engineering, systems and operations planning, project development feasibility assessment oversight, and construction management. Among his more notable assignments, Mr. Blyden served as Project Manager on the Calpine team, which planned a 70,000 MW development program. Within this scope he also served as a site Construction Manager for the Calpine Emergency PeakerProgram which constructed and commissioned eleven (11x 45 MW) General Electric simple cycle gas turbine units in response to California executive order D-26-01 issued to protect the grid around Silicon Valley at the peak of the 2001 California energy crisis. An early advocate of an Integrated African Grid for development, Mr. Blyden presented a conceptual framework and technical analysis for a centralized African Power pool with links to North Africa at the first IEEE Region 8 conference held in Nairobi, Kenya, December 1983. Since then he has authored a series of papers on African Power and Energy Development with a particular emphasis on the strategic role of Regional Power Pool Interconnections, Micro Grids and Knowledge development from an evaluation of data associated with the planning of these initiatives and specifically the power pools. He is a Life Member of the IEEE and serves as Chair of the IEEE PES International Practices subcommittee for Africa.