Daniella Piper

She’s Engineering a Clean Energy Future for New York State

Daniella Piper credits her interest in electrical engineering to her dad, an electrician, who she watched work on projects around their home in Trinidad and Tobago. Now, she helps lead America’s largest state-owned power organization, operating 17 generating facilities and more than 1,550 circuit-miles of transmission lines. Piper began working at the NYPA as a college intern and, during her 17 years with the organization, she’s been integral to some of the NYPA’s most important efforts, including the Marcy South Series Compensation Project (that increased the amount of power moved from upstate to downstate without building new lines) and the authority’s first digital transformation office. In 2023, she was promoted to Chief Innovation Officer, responsible for developing, testing, and implementing new technologies that support New York’s clean energy goals. These include a just-launched solar project at the Wards Island Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility in New York City, the largest clean energy installation at a wastewater facility in the world.

By Audrey Goodson Kingo