Michael Davidson (University of California, San Diego)

Date: Thu. March 21st, 2024, 4:00 pm-5:00 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

Optimizing Continental Scale Renewable Energy Systems

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 renewables dominant. I will
describe the key computational trade-offs and optimization methods that are used to plan land
use. 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.