Energy Transition
Towards a robust integrated resource planning framework for low-carbon electricity systems operating under uncertainty in demand growth, technology costs, and weather-dependent generation. This research integrates capacity expansion planning, production cost simulation, planning reserve margin estimation, capacity credit evaluation, and resource adequacy assessment to characterize how investment and operational decisions jointly shape power system reliability. Such analysis is increasingly critical in capacity markets, where accurately quantifying reliability contributions is essential to ensuring adequate revenue for investment recovery in low-carbon power systems.
GridPath-India: Capacity Expansion and Production Cost Model
We developed GridPath-India, a capacity expansion and production cost model of the Indian electricity system, built on GridPath, an open-source power system planning platform for Python. The model represents India’s electricity system with 34 load zones plus Bhutan, interstate transmission, and hourly demand, optimizing generation, storage, and transmission investments across multiple planning periods. The underlying long-term (2020–2050) planning model data are publicly available through our Dryad repository (Terrén-Serrano et al., 2026).
Affordable Low-Carbon Pathways for India
Using GridPath-India, we examined how uncertainty in demand growth, technology costs, and renewable resource availability jointly shapes the affordability of India’s low-carbon electricity transition, identifying investment pathways that remain robust across a wide range of plausible futures. Our findings are presented in the preprint Affordable low-carbon electricity pathways for India under uncertainty, now available on arXiv.
Ongoing Work: Resource Adequacy and Capacity Credit
Building on this modeling framework, ongoing work links planning reserve margin estimation, capacity credit evaluation, and resource adequacy assessment to the capacity expansion results, in order to quantify the reliability contributions of wind, solar, and storage resources and their implications for capacity market design. We presented this resource adequacy assessment at the 2026 Macro-Energy Systems Workshop at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
This research is conducted with the Energy Program at the Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.