ESD Faculty, Students, and local alumni:
Please join us for the dissertation defense of Rhonda Jordan.
Date: Monday, September 17, 2012
Time: 10am
Room: 9-151
Title: Incorporating Endogenous Demand Dynamics into Long-term Capacity Expansion Power System Models for Developing Countries
Committee: M. Webster (chair), R. de Neufville, J. Sterman, I. Perez-Arriaga
The abstract follows, and a draft of the dissertation is available to ESD Faculty and doctoral students online:
https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/ESDwiki/Doctoral+Thesis+Drafts
Other ESD Community members may request a draft for review from me.
Regards,
Beth
ABSTRACT
This research develops a novel approach to long-term power system capacity expansion planning for developing countries by incorporating endogenous demand dynamics resulting from social processes of technology adoption. Conventional capacity expansion models assume exogenous demand growth; however, literature suggests that this assumption is not appropriate for developing countries.
The approach presented in this research explicitly represents the links between the social and technical components of the power system. As customers without electricity select between various supply options to meet their power needs, the demand for grid power is directly impacted. Similarly, the price of electricity supply and the perceived performance of the grid impact customer choice. The case study of this thesis demonstrates that neglecting these feedbacks and resorting to simplified assumptions can result in suboptimal investment strategies.
By comparing the investment strategies identified using this novel approach to that of more conventional approaches, this research highlights cases in which the incorporation of endogenous demand impacts capacity expansion planning. More specifically, incorporating endogenous electricity demand is important when there is a large fraction of the population without access to power and when the improvement in reliability afforded by capacity expansion is large. Employing traditional capacity expansion methods in such cases may lead to the selection of inferior expansion strategies depending on the objective of the system planner.
This research necessitated the development of an integrated decision model. Two generally separate modeling approaches, system dynamics and optimization, are combined to capture both the technical details of power grid operation and endogenous electricity demand dynamics in order to simulate the performance and evolution of the electric power grid. The simulation model is used to identify strategic investment plans suited to meet growing demand at minimum costs for centralized power systems in developing countries. Finally, in order to compare the output of conventional approaches to the approach developed in this thesis, a power system capacity expansion model assuming exogenous demand was developed using mixed-integer programming.
This research has both academic and applied contributions. It demonstrates a holistic approach to centralized power planning that enables a more realistic representation of grid demand in developing countries, and results in the identification of strategies that, in some cases, perform better than the strategies identified using traditional approaches. This research also developed a modular, power system modeling framework that integrates the social and technical aspects of the system. While this research was inspired by the case of Tanzania, the approach was developed with the flexibility to be applied to other countries with similar power system structure and contextual features.