National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

May — August 2023, Golden, CO

I worked as a PhD summer researcher at the energy systems control and optimization group under the Power Systems Engineering Center at NREL. I was mentored by Andrey Bernstien and Guido Cavraro.

We proposed network-cognizant and welfare-maximizing pricing mechanisms for autonomous energy systems with self-interested and heterogeneous agents. The proposed pricing preserves agents’ information privacy and satisfies individual rationality and equity axioms while ensuring network-awareness. Our work has been published at the 2023 IEEE Allerton, 2024 IEEE CDC, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems in 2024.

The Brattle group

May - August, 2022, Boston, MA

I worked as a Summer Associate at the Brattle Group under the supervision of Sanem Sergici.

At Brattle, I worked on problems related to i) Net Energy Metering (NEM) policy evolution, and the accompanying challenges such as cross-subsidies between technology adopters and non-adopters, and utility death spirals resulting from revenue shortfalls under NEM. I also worked on electric vehicle adoption patterns, focussing on higher locational granularity. Lastly, and realizing the increasing retail electricity rates, I worked on a task involving innovative bill affordability program designs.

Electric Power Research Institute

May - August, 2021, Palo Alto, CA

I worked with the DER Integration team under the Power Delivery and Utilization unit (PDU) at EPRI. I was mentored by Tanguy Hubert.

The theme of my work at EPRI was on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)’s Order No. 2222, which aims to facilitate the participation of behind-the-meter distributed energy resources (DERs) into the wholesale electricity market. The work provided a starting point for Measurement and Verification (M&V) practitioners tasked with understanding the new complexities introduced by wider participation of DERs in delivering grid services. The topics we discussed include possible metering configurations, and the new challenges introduced by value stacking strategies (also called “dual participation”), which M&V practices for DER-provided grid services must consider.

A whitepaper was published as a result of this work, entitled “Measurement and Verification (M&V) for Distributed Energy Resources Providing Grid Services: New Complexities, Common Approaches, and Research Needs“ with report number 3002023286 (link).