PUBLIC LECTURE: Enhancing winter reliability through emergency gas prioritization to electricity generators

THIS LECTURE WILL BE HOSTED AS A HYBRID EVENT

The Melbourne Energy Institute invites you to a public lecture by Associate Professor Chiara Lo Prete from Pennsylvania State University, who will speak on enhancing winter reliability through emergency gas prioritization to electricity generators.

The growing dependence of the U.S. power grid on natural gas has increased its vulnerability to extreme cold weather events. Winter storms over the past decade, such as the 2014 Polar Vortex and Winter Storm Uri in 2021, caused widespread power outages, largely due to fuel supply interruptions at gas-fired generators. These disruptions primarily stem from pipeline constraints, which result from the prioritization of residential and commercial gas use over electricity generation during emergencies. While many studies in the literature focus on expanding electricity and gas pipeline infrastructure to mitigate these disruptions, this paper explores an alternative policy option that improves gas allocation efficiency by prioritizing gas deliveries to power plants with ``super firm'' transportation contracts over industrial customers with firm contracts. We develop an optimization modeling framework to assess the costs and benefits of this policy on a realistic gas-electric system representing the Northeastern U.S. during the 2014 Polar Vortex. Our model explicitly incorporates competing gas uses across sectors, transportation contract types, and emergency gas prioritization regimes, which have been neglected in previous studies. Additionally, we develop a novel dataset on gas deliveries by sectors (residential, commercial, industrial and power plants) and transportation contract types (firm and interruptible).

SPEAKER:

Associate Professor Chiara Lo Prete

Associate Professor of Energy Economics

Associate Head for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion 

Pennsylvania State University

Chiara Lo Prete is Associate Professor of Energy Economics in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University. Her research centers on the modeling of energy markets and systems, with a focus on the areas of competition and design of electricity markets, energy system interdependencies, and energy geopolitics. Recent work has used tools from economics, mathematics and engineering to study natural gas market design to enhance grid reliability during winter emergencies, electricity market structures for wind energy integration and resource adequacy, the weaponization of electricity trade, and emission leakage in the Western U.S. Before joining Penn State, Lo Prete was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard University from 2012 to 2014. She earned a B.A. in Economics (summa cum laude) from LUISS University, a M.A. in Energy Economics from the Scuola Mattei, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University.

MODERATOR:

Professor Pierluigi Mancarella

Chair Professor of Electrical Power Systems, University of Melbourne

Pierluigi Mancarella obtained his PhD degree in Power Systems from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, did his post-doc at Imperial College London, UK, and has held visiting research positions at Sintef/NTNU in Norway and NREL in Colorado, as well as visiting professorships at Ecole Centrale de Lille in France, the Universidad de Chile, and Tsinghua University in China.

Pierluigi has been involved in/led, in the last 15 years, some 50 research projects and consultancy and professional activities in the UK, Australia, and internationally, in the area of grid integration of renewables and distributed energy resources, techno-economic modelling of low-carbon power systems, business cases for smart grid technologies, reliability and resilience assessment of future networks, multi-energy systems and sector coupling, and energy infrastructure investment under uncertainty. Pierluigi is author of several books and book chapters, and of over 200 research papers. He is an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, IEEE Systems Journal, and the brand-new Oxford Open Energy journal. Pierluigi is also an IEEE Power and Energy Society Distinguished Lecturer, the first Chair of the Energy Working Group of the IEEE European Public Policy Initiative, and the Convenor of the Cigre Working Group C6/C2.34 "Flexibility provision from DER". He led the power system security assessment studies commissioned by the "Finkel Review" panel and actively collaborates as a researcher and consultant for industry and government bodies, including AEMO, AEMC and AER.