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Date:  Tue, January 14, 2025
Time:  10:30am - 11:30am
Location:  Holmes Hall 389
Speaker:  Johanna Mathieu, Associate Professor, University of Michigan

Abstract

Distributed energy resources (DERs), such as energy storage, flexible electric loads, and renewable energy sources, can provide a variety of services to the power grid, including electricity market services. DERs are technically capable of capacity, energy, and ancillary service provision, though many electricity markets around the world still do not allow, or make it difficult for, DERs to (fully) participate in these markets. Market participation often requires aggregation, i.e., treating a large number of DERs as a single controllable resource, within an electricity market. New entities, referred to as aggregators, have formed to aggregate and coordinate DERs. However, this has led to challenges, for example, how to manage distribution network impacts (i.e., changes to power flows leading to the possibility of voltage and current constraint violations) when distribution-connected, aggregator-coordinated DERs provide services in wholesale electricity markets. In this talk, I will describe challenges and opportunities associated with DER participation in electricity markets, highlighting recent research from my group and others that demonstrates the technical ability of DERs to play an active role in grid balancing, and the barriers that remain, which currently limit the scale of this important resource.

Biography

Johanna Mathieu is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on ways to reduce the environmental impact, cost, and inefficiency of electric power systems via new operational and control strategies. She is particularly interested in developing new methods to actively engage distributed energy resources such as energy storage, flexible electric loads, and renewables in power system operation. This is especially important in power systems with high penetrations of intermittent renewable energy resources such as wind and solar. She also uses engineering methods to inform energy policy. Professor Mathieu has PhD and master's degrees from the University of California Berkeley and a bachelor's degree from MIT. She was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.