Energy Systems Analysis
CASTLE Lab is a founding member of the Regional Energy
System Technology Analysis Center (RESTAC) based at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory. To view our new brocure, click
here.
Our research focuses on the design and control of energy systems under
uncertainty. One important application of this work is to simulate how decisions
are made so that we can understand how energy operators behave under realistic
operating conditions. This work will also allow us to understand how the performance
of a technology affects its use in the marketplace.
Energy
research - A summary of our research projects, including topics such as:
- Understanding the economics of intermittent energy in the presence
of storage such as water reservoirs.
- Models and algorithms for planning energy investments under fine-grained
and coarse-grained uncertainty.
- Design of wind farm portfolios to take advantage of the covariance
structure between different locations.
- Models and algorithms to find optimal portfolios of energy production
and storage technologies
- R&D portfolio optimization to meet policy goals with minimum
risk.
The
undergraduate energy research group - The senior thesis working group is
studying a diverse range of problems such as
- The effect of climate change on the use of hydroelectric facilities
as a regulating process for wind energy
- The impact of storage technologies on the design of optimal wind
farm portfolios
- Investment strategies for the development of solar technology
- The effect of different storage choices on the trading of natural
gas
- The use of physical hedges to manage uncertainty in energy production
- Auction strategies for optimizing energy bids, and optimal learning
strategies for finding bid prices
Energy resources - A growing compilation
of links to interesting sources of information in energy