Prof. Ben Hobbs

This talk is in two parts. The first is on the practical challenges to market software to adding battery storage to a system amounting to one-third of the system peak (17 GW in California), including market power, technical constraints, and interaction of arbitrage and reserve functions. The second is on the challenges of using large-scale optimization to plan grids while considering the value of diversification and adaptability under a profoundly uncertain future. There is crucial research to be done by EPICS and the power systems & economics community on these topics

Ben Hobbs earned his PhD from Cornell University, where his thesis was on models of network-constrained oligopolistic competition among electric generators. He has been at JHU since 1995 in the Department of Environmental Health & Engineering, and has served as chair and deputy chair of that department. He is the Theodore & Kay Schad Professor of Environmental Management. He was previously on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University and a staff researcher at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Labs (US). He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of INFORMS, and received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from President Reagan.

He has been a member of the California power market’s surveillance committee since 2002, and now serves as its chair. From 1995-2002, he was a consultant to the Office of the Economic Advisor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Dr. Hobbs is a Global Director of EPICS, a NSF Global Climate center within the JHU Robert O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute on managing renewable-dominated power systems. EPICS is a partnership with the University of Melbourne, CSIRO, and Imperial College London. Previously, he directed the JHU Environment, Energy, Sustainability & Health Institute (E2SHI) and was JHU director for the Yale-JHU Solutions for Energy, Air, Climate & Health (SEARCH) center.