ChBE Fall Seminar: Multiscale Design, Operations, and Control Optimization of Integrated Energy Systems Considering Energy Market Interactions

The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering welcomes Alexander W. Dowling, a assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame, for a lecture titled “Multiscale Design, Operations, and Control Optimization of Integrated Energy Systems Considering Energy Market Interactions” on Wednesday, November 9, 2022, from 3:15–4:30 p.m. in Room 108 of Perlstein Hall. 

Abstract

With increasing urgency to address climate change, integrated energy systems (IESs) are promising approaches to facilitate grid reliability with large-scale integration of non-dispatchable renewable energy. Traditionally, IESs are analyzed with a process-centric paradigm, ignoring important resource-grid interactions. In this talk, Alexander W. Dowling will present a new multiscale simulation and optimization frameworks that integrate process- and grid-centric modeling paradigms to better design, operate, and control IESs in wholesale energy markets. Dowling and his team’s approach explicitly models the complex interactions between an IES's bidding, scheduling, and control decisions and the energy market's clearing and settlement processes, while incorporating operational uncertainties. Through modeling various technologies, they show the strong economic incentives for transacting multiple market products (e.g., energy, ancillary services) and multiple timescales. Similarly, they show how rigorous steady-state model process optimization (or surrogates) can be used to systematically compare the economics of co-producing electricity and H2 for several technologies. They then show the limitations of price taker assumptions in the co- optimization of IES design and operations decisions, and present a multiscale framework to quantify IES-market interactions. Finally, they present tractable optimization formulations that embed these market interactions via algebraic surrogate or neural network models into co-optimization of IES design and annual operation decisions. This talk highlights the advanced multiscale IES and energy infrastructure modeling capabilities development by the Institute of the Advanced Energy Systems and the Design Integration and Synthesis Platform to Advance Tightly Coupled Hybrid Energy Systems (DISPATCHES) projects. These projects are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, through the Crosscutting Research Program and the Advanced Combustion Systems Program, and by the U.S. Department of Energy through the Grid Modernization Initiative as part of its Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (DISPATCHES).

Biography

Alexander W. Dowling is an assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame, with a concurrent appointment in applied and computational mathematics and statistics. His research combines chemical engineering, computational optimization, and uncertainty quantification to enable principled molecular-to-systems engineering of sustainable energy and environmental technologies. Dowling has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award (2019) and two R&D 100 awards. He holds a B.S.E from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, all in chemical engineering. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2015 to 2017, and he currently supervises eleven chemical engineering doctoral students at Notre Dame.