Investment in a Zero Marginal Cost World
The next presentation in the Texas A&M Energy Institute Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Alfredo Garcia, a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University, will be held on Friday, February 23, 2018 from 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. in the Frederick E. Giesecke Engineering Research Building (GERB) Third Floor Conference Room. The topic will be “Investment in a Zero Marginal Cost World”
Biography
Alfredo Garcia has degrees in electrical engineering from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia (1991) and the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France (1992) and a Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan (1997). From 1998 to 2000, he served as Commissioner in the Colombian Energy Regulatory Commission, and from 2001 to 2017 he was a member of the faculty at the University of Virginia and the University of Florida. His research interests include game theory and dynamic optimization with applications in electricity and communication networks.
Abstract
Declining marginal costs of electricity (partly due to increasing renewable capacity) pose a number of significant challenges for electricity markets. For example, with high levels of renewable capacity, wholesale electricity markets where the spot price is set by marginal technology may require regulatory designs (e.g. capacity markets) aimed at ensuring adequate reserves to guarantee reliability, robustness and/or resilience. In this talk, we will examine a number of outstanding research challenges related to ensuring that the scale and technology mix of new capacity investments meet different energy policy objectives.