Thursday, November 6, 2025 - 11:00am
Event Calendar Category
EIMC2 Talks
Speaker Name
Audun Botterud
Affiliation
MIT LIDS
Building and Room number
45-600B
Join Zoom meeting
Towards Zero-Carbon: Planning future electricity systems and markets"
The electric power system stands at the center of global decarbonization efforts. We discuss the role of capacity expansion modeling in guiding investment decisions in generation and transmission capacity, decarbonization policies, and future electricity market design. We demonstrate the use of large-scale least-cost optimization to identify viable decarbonization pathways under different climate policies, to assess the importance of transmission in zero-carbon systems dominated by wind and solar energy, and to evaluate cost and reliability effects of different transmission policies. We also illustrate how analytical formulations of the capacity expansion problem can provide insights into price formation and revenue sufficiency for wind, solar, and energy storage under long-run equilibrium conditions. We conclude by identifying research directions to better inform planning, market design, and policy in future low-carbon power systems.
Audun Botterud is a Principal Research Scientist in Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT, where he leads the Energy Analytics Group. He has a co-appointment in the Energy Systems and Infrastructure Assessment Division at Argonne National Laboratory. His research group applies decision science and operations research to study power systems and electricity markets, with a particular focus on the roles of renewable energy and energy storage. Audun holds a M.Sc. (Industrial Engineering) and a Ph.D. (Electrical Power Engineering), both from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He was previously with SINTEF Energy Research in Trondheim, Norway, and was recently a Visiting Research Fellow in the Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG) at the University of Cambridge.