ARE PhD students Matt Dudek and Mahdi Shams presented their respective research in the Lab this week. 
 

Matt’s work looks at the impact of battery storage on service curtailments in the California electricity market. California's renewable portfolio standard requires a rapid de-carbonization of the state's electricity supply by 2045. Despite renewables' rapidly decreasing fixed costs, increased reliance on intermittent, primarily solar, generation creates two challenges for California's grid operator — first, maximum solar generation does not coincide with peak demand during the day. Second, locations with the greatest generation potential are distant from the state's demand centers. The spatial mismatch between supply and demand sites increases the frequency of line congestion, causing localized curtailment and negative prices despite the willingness to pay elsewhere. Utility-scale storage promises to mitigate the inefficiencies of intermittent generation by allowing owners to arbitrage electricity across time and space. Matt’s research investigates whether batteries operating in California's wholesale electricity market have increased the productivity of renewables, indicated by reductions in curtailment, and whether these impacts varied with the batteries' location.

Mahdi is interested in agricultural water use, and the effects of water scarcity on agricultural production. His presentation illustrated how current estimates of the average effect of water allocations on agricultural production may mask substantial heterogeneity across landowners. In future work, he hopes to estimate the effect of differing water allocations across the full distribution of landowners, with implications for climate adaptation in agriculture.