Title: Challenges and Opportunities in the Electricity Grid: Existing Designs, Emerging Technologies, and Market Efficiency
Speaker: Dr. Rajni Kant Bansal (University of California, San Diego)
Venue: IEOR Seminar Room
Date and time: 03 February 2025 (Monday), 10:30 – 11:30 a.m.
Abstract: The growing adoption of renewable energy, driven by decarbonization goals, policy shifts, and falling costs, has introduced challenges such as supply intermittency and load variability, raising concerns about system reliability. My research examines the role of storage in grid operation and planning using a game-theoretic approach. Drawing from supply function bidding, we propose a novel bid structure for storage participation that allows units to communicate their costs through energy-cycling functions mapping prices to cycle depths. This mechanism accounts for operational costs, which are often overlooked in traditional market designs, and encourages storage to reveal its true costs at equilibrium, improving market efficiency. Extending to real-time markets, I propose a mixed mechanism with a rolling window framework to address demand forecast errors. The solution shows potential savings of up to 68% compared to the standard generation-centric approach. Finally, I analyze the impact of storage losses on grid planning, focusing on trade-offs in resource mix, infrastructure, and design to support decarbonization. Using a capacity expansion model with projected storage costs, I show that idealized approaches may overestimate energy capacity by 76% and underestimate transmission capacity by 97%.
Bio: Rajni Kant Bansal is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2012, and his M.S.E. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, as well as his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, from Johns Hopkins University in 2023. He has also worked as a research intern with the Grid Operations and Planning team at the Electric Power Research Institute and as a financial analyst at Credit Suisse Investment Bank. Rajni has been awarded the Northwestern-Argonne NAISE Fellowship and the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) Overseas Doctoral Fellowship. Additionally, he is the recipient of the GRO Conference Grant in 2022, the Student Travel Grant in 2021, and the Institute Academic Excellence Award in 2014.