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• Quantifying the Electric Grid Cost Savings of Increasing E-Bike Mode Share

  • Role: Co-Principal Investigator

  • Duration: September 2022 to August 2023

  • Funding Agency: University Transportation Center - Pacific Southwest Region (PSR-UTC) 

  • Partners: UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies

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The state of California aims to rapidly decarbonize the transportation system via transitioning from fossil-fuel-powered vehicles to battery electric vehicles (BEVs). One issue with this approach is that there are significant financial costs associated with expanding the capacity of the electric grid to support higher peak loads from BEV charging, compared to current peak loads. The emergence of electric-powered bikes (E-bikes) as a possible travel mode offers a potential means of reducing demand for the electric grid, as the energy requirements for an E-bike trip are significantly lower than the energy requirements of the same distance BEV trips.
This research project aims to quantify the electric grid benefits of shifting vehicle trips, specifically BEV trips, to E-bikes. The project will quantify the monetary benefits (i.e. cost savings from less electric grid expansion) associated with shifting some BEV trips to E-bikes, under a variety of different scenarios. The scenario analysis will also allow the research team to identify the most beneficial, yet feasible, trips to switch from BEV to E-bike.

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• Identifying Hydropower Operational Flexibilities in Presence of Streamflow and Net-load Uncertainty

  • Role: Co-Principal Investigator

  • Duration: January 2020 to June 2023

  • Funding Agency: U.S. Department of Energy

  • Partners: UC Irvine Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS)

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Hydropower resources can potentially fulfill an important role in supporting a future decarbonized or highly renewable electricity system by providing flexible and low-emissions electricity generation that can respond to the variability of wind and solar as well as provide reliability services for the electricity system. However, these facilities are operated to comply with forecasts and constraints from local weather patterns, competing purposes, water demands, and local environmental regulations. This project will explore the potential for increasing the flexibility of existing hydropower facilities through modified operational practices that can better support the electric grid while complying with local constraints.

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• Development and Integration of Open-Source Transportation Electrification and Load Flexibility Tools

  • Role: Principal Investigator

  • Duration: October 2020 to February 2023

  • Funding Agency: Breakthrough Energy Sciences

  • Partners: N/A

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Breakthrough Energy Sciences, the research and assessment division of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has developed an open-source, high spatial resolution model of the continental U.S. electric transmission grid for the purpose of assessing electricity infrastructure needs associated with the development of a fully decarbonized electricity system. To expand the potential scope of this capability to answer key research questions, Breakthrough Energy Sciences is collaborating with university partners to add capabilities to this platform. This project in particular aims to develop and integrate open source tools for capturing the effects of large-scale light-duty and heavy-duty plug-in electric vehicle charging on the nationwide transmission grid, leveraging, translating, and improving upon UC Irvine's established capability in this area.

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• Cost-Benefit Analysis of Additional Energy Storage Procurement

  • Role: Principal Investigator

  • Duration: October 2021 to September 2022

  • Funding Agency: California Public Utilities Commission

  • Partners: N/A

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Energy storage technologies are becoming widely recognized as key enablers of building a decarbonized electricity system. However, energy storage technologies span a wide array of individual technologies, including but not limited to different conventional battery systems, flow batteries, hydrogen, pumped hydropower, and other systems that each have different dynamic capabilities, costs, and potential for improvement. At the same time, the grid services that will be required to reliably operate a future, decarbonized electricity system require resources with different capabilities. This project is focused on exploring which energy storage technologies are best suited for different roles in supporting a decarbonized electricity system for the purpose of informing future procurement of energy storage in California.

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• Maximizing the Environmental Utility of Battery Energy Storage

  • Role: Principal Investigator

  • Duration: January 2019 to December 2021

  • Funding Agency: University of California Office of the President

  • Partners: UC Davis, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara

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Due to intermittency in wind and solar resources, battery energy storage has been identified as a key technology for enabling their increased utilization by reducing losses due to curtailment and matching electricity supply and demand. Battery storage, however, includes a diverse array of technologies each with differing efficiency and durability, unique material compositions, manufacturing processes, disposal or recycling methods, and life cycle resource requirements which have health and environmental footprints of their own. While many battery technologies can improve system-wide performance of a renewable-intensive grid, the health and environmental benefits may be offset by impacts resulting from the life cycle impacts of batteries. Before battery technologies are deployed at large-scale to support State-wide health and environmental goals, it is critical to develop an understanding of the full spectrum of health and environmental benefits and impacts associated with the life cycle of different battery technologies. Therefore, the proposed research aims to: 1) develop the data and analytical capabilities for comprehensively characterizing and comparing the life cycle health and environmental footprint of different battery technologies accounting for their materials of construction, interaction with the electric grid during use, and end-of-life management options; and 2) utilize these capabilities in a pilot study to identify potentially undesirable impacts and key research needs to mitigate them.

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• Characterizing the Role of Flexible Geothermal Resources in Supporting Decarbonized Electricity Grids

  • Role: Principal Investigator​

  • Duration: March 2021 to September 2021

  • Funding Agency: U.S. Department of Energy

  • Partners: N/A

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Geothermal energy technologies represent a controllable zero-carbon electricity resource that can support grids with with large penetration levels of wind and solar, without some of the geographical constraints of hydropower or the social and political constraints of nuclear power, and may therefore play an important role in developing decarbonized electricity systems in certain regions. Typically, geothermal power plants are operated at steady state, but to support wind and solar-heavy electric grids, there may be some benefits in operating these resources more dynamically. This project performs a preliminary analysis focused on assessing the grid benefits of operating geothermal power plants flexibly and the costs incurred by geothermal power plant operators in doing so.

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• Integration of HiGRID into the Net Emissions Analysis Tool (NEAT)

  • Role: Co-Principal Investigator

  • Duration: August 2019 to December 2020

  • Funding Agency: South Coast Air Quality Management District

  • Partners: N/A

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The South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) has developed the Net Emissions Analysis Tool (NEAT) for the purpose of assessing how the increasing electrification of appliances and other energy uses will affect criteria air pollutant emissions within the South Coast Air Basin of California. To more accurately capture this effect, a dynamic representation of the electric grid is required. This project seeks to integrate the Holistic Grid Resource Integration and Deployment (HiGRID) electric grid dispatch model developed at UC Irvine into the NEAT tool for better representing the response of the electric grid to electrified energy demands.

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• Electric  Grid  Reliability  and  Greenhouse  Gas  Implications of  Climate  Change-Impacted Hydropower  Resources (CERC-WET Project 3.4)

  • Role: Senior Personnel

  • Duration: October 2015 to October 2020

  • Funding Agency: U.S. Department of Energy

  • Partners: N/A

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This project seeks to characterize how climate change effects on regional hydrology will affect the ability of hydroelectricity resources to provide low-carbon, flexible electricity generation and ancillary services for the electric grid in different regions of the U.S. The dynamic capabilities of hydropower fulfill an important role for supporting the electric grid, especially in the context of increasing wind and solar deployment in these systems. Specifically, four regions in the U.S. are being analyzed: California, New York, Washington State, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, each affected differently by climate change and with different levels of dependence on hydropower resources.

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• Model Intercomparison to Inform the Development of Open Source, Grid Scale, Power System Simulation tools

  • Role: Principal Investigator 

  • Duration: January 2020 to September 2020

  • Funding Agency: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

  • Partners: North Carolina State University

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The electric grid is evolving rapidly through the integration of renewable and zero-carbon electricity resources, integration of electrified vehicles and flexible loads, and the increasing penetration of distributed generation and decentralized energy systems. Additionally, the electric grid of the future will be subject to changing environmental conditions from climate change and interactions with the water sector. However, many current electric grid modeling tools are built to represent the topology and practices of the current electricity system and may not adequately capture the operational dynamics of the future electric grid. This project focuses on characterizing the state-of-the-art modeling tools for electric grid operations and seeks to understand what characteristics of these tools enable or restrict them from representing phenomena that are necessary to more accurately model the future electric grid.

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• A  Comparative,  Comprehensive  Life  Cycle  Assessment  of  the  Environmental  and  Human Health  Impacts  of  Emerging  Energy  Storage  Technology  Deployment 

  • Role: Principal Investigator​

  • Duration: June 2017 to August 2020

  • Funding Agency: California Energy Commission

  • Partners: ESS Inc, Primus Power, UniEnergy Technologies

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This project seeks to characterize and understand the resource requirements and emissions outputs associated with the materials extraction, manufacturing, use, and disposal or recycling processes of emerging energy storage technologies. In particular, this project will compile a life cycle inventory and perform a life cycle analysis to characterize the environmental benefits and impacts of three different flow battery energy storage chemistries: Vanadium Redox, Zinc Bromide, and Iron Sodium. The outcomes of this project are aimed at providing information about the strengths of these flow battery systems from a life cycle standpoint and potential unintended consequences of their deployment that need to be mitigated.

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• Demonstration  and  Evaluation  of  a  Plug-in  Electric  Vehicle  Smart  Charging  Algorithm  at Multiple  Electric  Grid  Scales 

  • Role: Co-Principal Investigator​ 

  • Duration: August 2016 to August 2018

  • Funding Agency: South Coast Air Quality Management District

  • Partners: Kia Motors, Hyundai America Technical Center Inc.

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This project characterized the potential benefits of implementing real-world smart charging algorithms in battery electric vehicles for the performance and uptake of renewable energy resources on the electricity system at different scales: microgrid and statewide grid. The research effort consists of two components: 1) modeling of the smart charging algorithm implementation on the CAISO electric grid with large penetrations of electric vehicles, and 2) demonstration and evaluation of the smart charging algorithm using a fleet of 10 Kia Soul battery electric vehicles deployed on the UC Irvine microgrid.

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• Life  Cycle  Assessment  of  Environmental  and  Economic  Impacts  of  Deploying  Alternative Urban  Bus  Powertrain  Technologies  in  the  South  Coast  Air  Basin  

  • Role: Co-Principal Investigator​ 

  • Duration: January 2018 to December 2018

  • Funding Agency: University Transportation Center - Pacific Southwest Region (PSR-UTC) 

  • Partners: N/A

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This project characterized and compared the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions effects of switching urban bus power trains from conventional diesel & natural gas vehicles to battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This effort utilized the Brightway 2 life cycle analysis capability developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute to assess emissions from the materials extraction, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life processes associated with different bus power trains, but specific to bus routes and infrastructure in the South Coast Air Basin of California. 

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• Building  a  Climate  Change  Resilient  Electricity  System  for  Meeting  California’s  Energy  and  Environmental  Goals

  • Role: Co-Principal Investigator​ and Technical Lead

  • Duration: July 2015 to July 2018

  • Funding Agency: California Energy Commission

  • Partners: Energy Environmental Economics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory​

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This project focused on systematically characterize potential impacts that changing climates may have on the availability and performance of key energy resources that comprise plans to meet California's long-term greenhouse gas emissions reduction and renewable portfolio standard goals. Specifically, climate change impacts on three aspects of the energy system were investigated: 1) changes in hydropower generation due to altered precipitation, streamflow and runoff patterns, 2) changes in the availability of solar thermal and geothermal power plant capacity due to shifting water availability, and 3) changes in the residential and commercial electric building loads due to increased temperatures. The effects of these on the ability of current plans to achieve long term goals were analyzed and changes in the resource mix to mitigate these effects were be determined.

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• Exploration of the Role of Power-to-Gas (P2G) in Renewable Electricity Systems

  • Role: Co-Principal Investigator​

  • Duration: February 2016 to August 2017

  • Funding Agency: Southern California Gas Company

  • Partners: N/A

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To better facilitate the integration of renewable energy resources in the future electric grid, energy storage will be required to compensate for the temporal mismatch between electric load and generation. While batteries can serve this function over hourly and daily timescales, mismatches on weekly to seasonal timescales require the ability to store very large amounts of energy to mitigate. Power-to-gas, where excess renewable electricity is used to produce renewable hydrogen that is stored in the natural gas infrastructure and extracted for use in gas turbines or fuel cells to retrieve that energy as electricity at a later time, can potentially fulfill long term energy storage needs. This project performed techno-economic analysis for the use of power-to-gas in future electricity systems

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• Piloting  the  Integration  and  Utilization  of  Renewables  to  Achieve  a  Flexible  and  Secure Energy  Infrastructure

  • Role: Doctoral Student Researcher

  • Duration: July 2009 to July 2012

  • Funding Agency: California Energy Commission

  • Partners: Southern California Edison

  • Link to Final Report

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This project focused on characterizing the obstacles associated with reaching high penetration levels of renewable resources on small-scale and large-scale electricity systems, and assessing the effectiveness of different solutions for overcoming these obstacles. This effort produced the Holistic Grid Resource Integration and Deployment (HiGRID) tool. HiGRID is an electric grid dispatch model which captures the response of electric grid operation to changes in the energy resource mix, transportation electrification, and other environmental forcing factors. A main output of this project was the development of a planning roadmap for resource deployment to facilitate high penetration levels of renewable energy resources in community and statewide electricity systems.

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