Leveraging Flexible Loads and Energy Storage to Enhance the Cost Efficiency, Reliability, and Resilience of Renewable-Energy-Driven Grids

As the global transition from coal and natural gas to renewable energy sources like solar and wind accelerates, the intermittency of these resources poses growing challenges for maintaining grid reliability and resilience year-round. Two promising strategies to address these challenges are (1) using energy storage to shift energy from periods of excess generation to periods of need and (2) leveraging flexible loads, such as electric vehicle (EV) charging, to align demand with renewable generation better. This dissertation explores the opportunities for energy storage and EV flexible charging to enhance both the cost-efficiency and resilience of future renewable-energy-driven grids. The findings provide actionable insights for policymakers, particularly in identifying and revising outdated market design structures, such as time-of-use electricity rates for charging EVs. Additionally, the results offer valuable guidance for industry stakeholders and investors seeking to understand the economic potential of various energy storage technologies and identify emerging market opportunities in the clean energy transition.

Farzan ZareAfifi is a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Merced. He joined Prof. Sarah Kurtz’s research group in the Fall of 2021. He holds a B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran, and an M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Merced. He worked on a project funded by the California Energy Commission (CEC) for about three years and also contributed to a project supported by California Seed Grants in his last year. He contributed to more than ten publications on electric grid capacity expansion modeling and pathways to improve the resiliency and reliability of future renewable-energy-driven grids.