$3 Million for Transformational Energy Technology
Caramanis will lead an interdisciplinary group of academic and industry researchers in creating a tool that measures the risk associated with energy markets
By Maureen Stanton for the Center for Information and Systems Engineering
Boston University was awarded $3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) for an academic-industry research collaboration that will be led by Michael Caramanis, BU Professor (ME, SE) and faculty affiliate of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering and of the Institute of Sustainable Energy. The funding will be used to develop a New Risk Assessment and Management Paradigm (NewRAMP) designed to overhaul Electricity Markets by efficiently addressing uncertainty in the forthcoming massive renewable generation and electrification of fossil fuel reliant energy uses.
“The NewRAMP project will develop innovative approaches that quantify the risk of individual Electric-Power-Grid-interconnected assets based on their performance and ability to deliver market cleared capacity and energy,” explains Prof. Caramanis. “By synthesizing ideas and theories from finance and insurance, operations research, power system engineering and electricity market design, NewRAMP will offer ground-breaking methodologies constituting a risk-driven paradigm to achieve higher adoption of stochastic resources and a more efficient and reliable system operation. As such, it will contribute to reducing imported energy, reducing energy-related emissions, and improving energy efficiency.”
BU-Harvard-MIT researchers team up with Brattle Group and Southwest Power Pool to develop Transformational Energy Technology
Boston University has put together an interdisciplinary team of renowned researchers from its College of Engineering, College of Arts & Sciences, and Questrom School of Business, along with uniquely qualified experts from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has also secured industry collaboration and support from the Brattle Group and the Southwest Power Pool (SPP).
Joining PI Michael Caramanis from the BU College of Engineering are Professors Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) and Yannis Pascalidis (ECE, BME, SE), Research Associate Professors Panagiotis Andrianesis (SE) and Pablo Ruiz (ME), and from the Questrom School of Business is Professor Nalin Kulatilaka (Finance) and from the College of Arts & Sciences is Adjunct Assistant Professor John Liagouris (Computer Science).
Co-investigators include Harvard University Professor William Hogan, Research Director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group (HEPG), and MIT Professor Dimitris Bertsimas, Associate Dean of Business Analytics.
Industry collaborators include Ryan Schoppe, Market Design, Southwest Power Pool and from The Brattle Group Principals Philip Hanser and James Read.
Adds Caramanis, “Our team includes key players in the establishment of wholesale power markets in the late 1990s, but despite their evolution and significant contributions, they have not yet had the opportunity to fully leverage new computation, measurement and communication capabilities to address the challenges posed by clean yet uncontrollable renewable generation and potentially synergistic new flexible loads, such as Electric Vehicles.”
Boston University received this competitive award from ARPA-E’s Performance-based Energy Resource Feedback, Optimization, and Risk Management (PERFORM) program, which works to develop innovative management systems that represent the relative delivery risk of each asset, like wind farms or conventional power plants, and balance the collective risk of all assets across the grid.
For additional information, please visit Prof. Caramnis’ webpage and the NewRamp project summary. http://www.bu.edu/pcms/caramanis and download NewRamp.
By Maureen Stanton, CISE Staff