SEMINAR:Planning Energy Transportation under Long-term Uncertainties

Speaker: Fikri Kucuksayacigil

Title: Planning Energy Transportation under Long-term Uncertainties

Date/Time:11 May 2022 / 18:45 - 19:45

Zoom link:  https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/95614106094?pwd=d09zZHd3c3dReW8zcEFncEhZTHBXQT09

Passcode: susu2020

Abstract:Policy makers are supporting renewable energy goals in order to address global climate change. One impediment to reach these goals is constraints on infrastructure. For the electric power sector, transmission lines have proven to be important bottlenecks to further expansion of renewable energy. Transmission expansion investments have long lead times and are subject to numerous uncertainties in deregulated markets. Similarly, for the fuels sector, recent issues in transportation of renewable power equipment will likely slow down the pace of decarbonization. Shipping companies face backlogs of ship building orders at shipyards and increasing cost of ship building materials. They may need to look for alternatives of buying new ships (e.g., capacity expansion) to increase transportation capability. Capacity expansion on existing ships requires an investment during the initial design phase, which is paid off with the benefit of larger cargo spaces. Trade-off between initial cost and financial benefit of extra cargo space is a challenging problem under demand uncertainty. This talk tries to answer (i) how should transmission expansion investments be planned under demand and distributed generation uncertainties and (ii) how should shipping companies strike a balance between capital investments while building a ship and subordinate capacity expansion costs? It also addresses an ongoing work of least-cost expansion of transmission networks in the western U.S. to meet green energy goals under jurisdictional uncertainties.

Bio: Fikri Kucuksayacigil is currently a postdoctoral fellow at University of California San Diego. He studies the political economy of power grid management under political uncertainties for the western United States. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Idaho National Laboratory where he developed mixed-integer programming, chance constraint and model predictive control formulations for biomass feeding systems. Before that, he was Data and Operations Research Science Intern at Principal Financial Group, where he developed portfolio optimization algorithms and risk hedging techniques. He holds a Ph.D. of Industrial Engineering from Iowa State University, M.S. of Industrial Engineering from Sabanci University and B.S. of Industrial Engineering from Istanbul Technical University.