[Theory Seminar] Mohammad Hajiesmaili

When:
September 6, 2017 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
2017-09-06T12:00:00-04:00
2017-09-06T13:00:00-04:00
Where:
Malone 228

Speaker: Mohammad Hajiesmaili
Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University

Title: Online storage management in electricity market

Abstract:

With unprecedented benefits in terms of efficiency, economy, reliability, and environmental awareness, in the recent years, there has been a rapid proliferation of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind in electric power systems. Despite these benefits, the inherent uncertainty in renewables places severe challenges on the management of the entire energy systems, including electricity market. Leveraging energy storage systems is a promising approach to mitigate the uncertainty of renewables, by charging and discharging during the mismatched periods. Energy storage systems, however, offers a new design space for additional optimization. That is, a storage system can capture energy during periods when the market prices are low and surrender stored energy when energy prices are high.
In this talk, we consider different scenarios of storage management in both supply and demand sides of the electricity market. The uncertainties in both renewable output and electricity market price, emphasizes the need for online solution design. The underlying theoretical problems could be described as extensions of conversion problems in financial markets, i.e., the search for best prices to buy and/or sell assets. The difference with the conversion problems, is that in addition to the uncertainty in the price, our problems suffer from another uncertainty originated from renewable output. We follow online algorithm design and use competitive ratio as the performance measure of our algorithms. We present our recent results in designing competitive online algorithms that achieve constant competitive ratios. In addition, we briefly talk about the case of utilizing aggregate potentials distributed small-scale storage systems, such as EVs or residential storages, to participate in electricity market through an aggregator. This setting is more challenging than the previous one, since the distributed sources also arrive in online manner with heterogeneous profiles.

Overall, we believe that changing the landscape of electric power system from a centralized predictable system to a distributed uncertain system opens a new research direction for leveraging online framework designs in this relatively under-explored area.