Director
Marco Padula is Director of the Office of Markets and Innovation at the New York Public Service Commission.
The New York Public Service Commission and New York Department of Public Service oversee a mandate in New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, to cut greenhouse gas emissions forty percent by 2030 and no less than eighty-five percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. All that, while carrying on its regulatory business in the public interest. The five hundred-plus dedicated Staff of the New York Department of Public Service are up to all these tasks. They are the Staff arm of the seven-member New York Public Service Commission.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: How did your background lead you to becoming the Director of the Office of Markets and Innovation at the Commission?
Marco Padula: I started as an electrical engineering student at Northeastern University in Boston. What inspired me to go into engineering was my father. He was a utility transmission line designer for forty-two years in New York State.
He was into electronics and went through the whole Bell and Howell Schools Heathkit program to build an entire television and the equipment to fix it. When I was little, my siblings and I watched him do it, piece by piece. I stared at that twenty-five-inch color TV in our living room for years.
He gave me a radio kit to build on my own. That inspired me to go into the electrical engineering field.