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By Anjuli Deb -- With deep sadness and profound appreciation, we share the passing of LCG's founder, Dr. Rajat K. Deb. He was our president and one of the first entrepreneurs in the computer revolution. He was also our friend, our teacher and mentor, and for a few of us, our father and grandfather.
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LCG, June 2, 2026--Avangrid, Inc., a member of the Iberdrola Group, today announced that it has completed construction of its Tower Solar project in Oregon and connected it to the electric grid. Once commissioning activity is complete, the project will deliver energy to Portland General Electric (PGE) and help support QTS operations in the region.
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Industry News
In Memory of Rajat Deb: Inspiring Man of Ideas and Remarkable Silicon Valley Archetype
By Anjuli Deb - With deep sadness and profound appreciation, we share the passing of LCG’s founder, Dr. Rajat K. Deb. He was our president and one of the first entrepreneurs in the computer revolution. He was also our friend, our teacher and mentor, and for a few of us, our father and grandfather.
Dr. Deb steered LCG Consulting through an astonishing four decades of electricity market changes, keeping the ship upright through every kind of weather: the end of vertical integration, the dawn of the personal computer, the invention of the Independent System Operator, the ongoing metamorphosis of data science, California’s electricity crisis of 2001, market restructuring, renewable technologies, and an unending parade of new market policies and products.
He was fearlessly curious about the world and future. Even when he returned home from the office, he would open two newspapers at once, laying them out on the coffee table, with CNN running on tv and a cup of strong black tea at hand. He adopted technology early and pushed LCG Consulting to remain relevant, whether staying ahead of the Duck Curve or launching the first U.S. website in the power industry, Energyonline.com.
Dr. Deb was born in 1939 in Sylhet. This region of Northeast India is wedged between Bhutan and Burma and was under British rule until 1947. Throughout his childhood, his family moved to various places in Assam, including Bihpuria, North Lakhimpur, and Shillong. His family endured political and economic instability, such as the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees escaping the Japanese takeover of Burma, millions of lives lost in the Bengal famine of 1943, and ultimately the Partition of India, where most of Sylhet became part of East Pakistan. His father was awarded a medal for service during WWII.
His father was a police investigator, first under the British, and then for India. His mother was a strong and unifying figure in the family, and she successfully raised ten children during one of the region’s most tumultuous periods. These ten Deb siblings went on to productive careers in areas including the military, energy industry, media news, accounting, and medicine. Dr. Deb was seventh of the family’s children, and he did not attend formal, indoor school until middle school. Yet Dr. Deb was admitted to, and later graduated from, prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
After emigrating to the Netherlands and then Canada, Dr. Deb came to the United States in 1967 and within three short years completed a PhD in Information Science at Syracuse University in New York. His advisor was Dr. Richard Serfozo, an expert in probability and stochastic processes.
Dr. Deb’s dissertation addressed queuing theory related to service systems that process items or jobs in batches, such as computers, supply chains, and mail order companies. He developed a general, mathematical model for dynamically determining the optimal time to serve batches, and the sizes of the batches.
“His published dissertation was referenced considerably more than my other students because it addressed a practical industrial problem, and he solved it elegantly,” Dr. Serfozo wrote.
Dr. Deb taught at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Oswego from 1971-1977. Within a few years, he was appointed chair to its fledgling Department of Computer Science, years before IBM even introduced the first PC in 1981.
Dr. Deb moved to California in 1979 to teach Operations Research at Stanford as a visiting professor. At that time, he suffered a heart attack, which challenged his ability to work and transition to living in California with a young family. With the help of heart surgery at Stanford Hospital, he was able to complete his Stanford teaching position, and afterwards he was offered jobs at Bell Labs and Santa Clara University. He opted to stay in sunny California and teach.
While teaching, Dr. Deb experimented with consulting work, and he incorporated Lotus Consulting Group in 1983. By 1985 he left Santa Clara University to devote himself to the company. Its initial projects included collaborations with the nearby Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on utility planning models.
Vic Niemeyer, who worked at EPRI for many years, remembered Dr. Deb’s “early prowess with primitive PCs, creating load displays, which I believe later gave him the ideas to build the UPLAN model.”
Like so many Silicon Valley businessmen of his era, Dr. Deb launched LCG Consulting at home in Palo Alto, in those days an affordable college town. His first employees would alternate sitting on the patio under the guava tree in the pleasant Palo Alto weather, and coding inside the dark and spidery backyard shed with a 16-bit, 80286 processor.
One of LCG’s first hurdles was the user interface. The growing research group needed to build a cursor that could allow the user to navigate up and down, as well as painstakingly ensure cells could become highlighted. Jon Fatula was the first LCG employee to dive into the ASCII characters for navigation logic like the return key. Basic code checked the ASCII code for each keystroke to determine whether to display characters or repaint a cell when moving with the arrow keys. This hand-crafted interface evoked a modern-day spreadsheet, though it didn't allow for formulas like Excel.
“The program would read the data, check, then reprint previous and put new highlight on the cell,” said Lielong Hsue, vice president at LCG.
“I remember when we had the first hard disc; it had maybe 20 megabytes,” she said. “Everyone was so excited,” she added, making a joke about the luxury of 20 MB in the ‘80s.
Other individuals who helped launch the company in its earliest days include Julie Chien, John Fuchigami, Francis Jim and Richard Albert.
“He was always positive, good humored, and proud of the intellectual power of his team. He was irrepressible force in the development of PC-based planning tools.” wrote EPRI’s Niemeyer of working with LCG. “I always enjoyed our banter.”
Ahmad Faruqui, who worked at EPRI during this era, said Dr. Deb was “a polyglot when it came to the full range of energy issues and a modeler par excellence,” and his expertise was not just confined to energy. Faruqui was born in Pakistan, and Dr. Deb in India. Despite the conflicts between their countries of origin, they enjoyed discussing political issues passionately and as friends, even in the last months of Dr. Deb’s life.
The company began as Lotus Consulting Group, named for the auspicious Indian flower, but others’ trademarks forced a pivot to LCG Consulting in 1988. Its first model was named USAM, but that was changed to UPLAN, a shortening of Utility Planning. For some years Dr. Deb had a license plate on his car that read UPLAN.
The office outgrew its shed and moved on to Palo Alto Square above the movie theater and ultimately to the current Los Altos location. Though they often spoke of skipping work to watch movies, nobody at LCG ever left work to catch a matinee.
"Your father created something amazing, which I believe to this day has such a profound impact on me and so many people in this industry we work in,” William Therriault wrote to Dr. Deb’s children. Therriault is a senior trading analyst for ExxonMobil Global Trading and spent years working with UPLAN.
“I remember the first time that I came to Houston at Calpine, and I remember so distinctly the first time that I learned about UPLAN, in those very early days of this ‘energy’ industry, before ERCOT was even an ISO,” he wrote.
Always an early adopter, Dr. Deb launched the Energyonline.com website in 1995, the same year Netscape began and only four years after CERN hatched the world’s very first website. Very soon Energyonline.com was publishing market data and daily electricity industry news, including countless, much beloved pieces by the true newsman Ric Teague, who shared Dr. Deb’s love of newspapers and growing chili plants.
In the initial period of electricity market deregulation, the industry did not use nodal modeling, and LCG’s model considered only load and generation without transmission. By the mid-1990s, the team had added transmission files and launched a fully nodal model, in time for the rollout of Independent System Operators in 1996. California introduced its Power Exchange in 1998.
When LCG added these capabilities, its model was unique for its era; it could handle systems with all possible transmission characteristics. Even today’s version of UPLAN outstrips its peers in its ability to model transmission congestion in detail.
“I still remember calling in 2001 to ask about UPLAN, and him telling me he was going to change my life. He did. He opened the door to a whole new path for me, and over time became more than that—a friend, an advisor, and someone who inspired me to keep pushing forward,” wrote Israel Melendez, Director of Transmission & Interconnection at Ecoplexus.
After the leap from generation to transmission modeling, Dr. Deb and his team began constructing actual databases and database management tools, like Second Wind, instead of using file storage. Second Wind allowed users to move between Microsoft Excel and Oracle Database, something that today’s data science industry would take for granted. Later the company moved to SQL server, and in recent years, it has expanded to the Cloud.
Demand-response expert and EPRI fellow Clark Gellings said that Dr. Deb helped him develop methods for comparing demand-side measures with supply-side measures in utility resource planning. He called Dr. Deb “a wizard with software, easy to work with and very knowledgeable.”
Modeling power systems took UPLAN all over the United States and abroad, such as Hong Kong and Japan, Greece, Oman, Scotland, Zimbabwe, Russia and Canada, and more.
Today at LCG, most of the team has been with the company more than 10 years, considerably longer than the average tenure at technology companies, which is two to three years. Even when employees decided to leave for other projects, many remain industry colleagues or friends. Several returned to work at LCG a second time.
“Some of the best memories are the hour-long conversations I had with him over the years. Those conversations shaped me in way that words cannot describe,” said Sumedh Halbe, a managing consultant at LCG.
Though his teaching days spanned only a handful of years, Dr. Deb remained a professor at heart, mentoring new hires, and encouraging everyone around him to interrogate their assumptions. He loved nothing more than to explore ideas and new problems through friendly debate. When called upon to describe LCG, Dr. Deb called it an R&D company.
Just about anyone whom Dr. Deb touched was amazed at his openness, and his sense of humanity and egalitarianism. Though Dr. Deb could boast many of the world’s largest energy stakeholders as clients, he would just as happily chat about current events or mathematics with the newest hire in the office, even if that person was a summer intern who arrived on a secondhand bicycle. He valued everyone by the metrics of intellectualism and integrity, not the size of anyone’s paycheck or the price of their car. And he always wanted to hear our perspectives.
Indeed, at LCG Consulting, Dr. Deb embodied the true spirit of those earlier days of Silicon Valley, following intellectual curiosity, creativity, and personal relationships, rather than profit and acquisition. He charmed us all with his ever-present sense of humor. He had an eclectic headwear collection – over 100 hats, helmets, caps, and masks – that he rolled out for the office Halloween parties. He liked to collect fountain pens.
In recent years, Dr. Deb has handed daily operations responsibility over to his son, Sidart Deb, while making time for his own projects. Sidart has been a force in his own right at LCG for almost 30 years and is at the helm now. And, a third generation of Debs has begun interning for the company.
Dr. Deb spent the last months with family and friends. He passed away peacefully at home, with family at his side.
We will treasure his jokes, his wisdom, generosity, perpetual candor, the way he admired ideas and debate, and his tenacious and fearless energy.
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UPLAN-NPM
The Locational Marginal Price Model (LMP) Network Power Model
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UPLAN-ACE
Day Ahead and Real Time Market Simulation
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UPLAN-G
The Gas Procurement and Competitive Analysis System
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PLATO
Database of Plants, Loads, Assets, Transmission...
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