Michael Davidson (University of California, San Diego)

Date: Thu. October 27th, 2022, 4:00 pm-5:00 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301; via zoom

Talk CANCELLED. Will be rescheduled for Spring

Optimizing High-Penetration Renewable Energy Development

 Widespread use of renewable electricity sources is necessary to address climate change, but their intermittency, geospatial variability, and large land footprints create unique challenges for optimizing deployment while respecting power flow and engineering constraints. In this talk, I will review approaches to plan continental scale systems that are renewable dominant. I will describe the key computational trade-offs and optimization methods that are used to plan land use. Physicists should find these methods accessible. Cost-effective deployment of high-penetration renewable energy systems depends not only on technological and economic considerations but also on market institutions and policy coordination. New areas of model development that combine engineering and political economy factors will be discussed.