Energy Seminar Series: Long-term Planning and Operations for the Electric Power Sector: Methods, Applications, and Challenges – December 5, 2025

Abstract:
The electric power sector is experiencing rapid changes and greater uncertainty than in many years. Electricity demand is projected to increase at a faster rate than previous decades due to electrification and data centers. Increasing wind and solar capacities and thermal generator retirements will likely increase short-term forecast errors and require greater system flexibility. Energy storage costs are decreasing rapidly, and batteries are likely to play a larger role in system operations, but questions remain about how much storage capacity will be deployed, what duration they will offer, and how to effectively manage a fleet of storage, particularly in regions with wholesale markets. Finally, increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events that disrupt system operations present reliability challenges because they induce greater spatial and temporal correlations in forced outage rates of system components.

This talk will overview several research projects on the planning and operations of power systems under uncertainty. The talk will present the problem of long-term generation and transmission planning under uncertainty, including the range of methods used and recent improvements. The talk will also present the corresponding challenges to electricity markets from the changes in the resource mix, including several recent research projects on this topic. Finally, the talk will frame several remaining challenges for practical methods for both planning and for markets/operations under greater uncertainty, and future research directions that arise from these challenges.

Biography:
Mort Webster is a Professor of Energy Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. His research develops methods for managing uncertainty for electric power systems planning, operations, and electricity market design, with a focus on stochastic optimization methods. Current projects include the development of stochastic optimization methods for solving multi-stage adaptive expansion planning (generation and/or transmission), methods for managing large high-dimensional scenario space, and real-time market designs to manage uncertainty and incentivize flexible resources. Prof. Webster has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in engineering, operations research, and economic journals, and has served on several national and international panels. Prior to joining Penn State, Prof. Webster was Assistant and Associate Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006-2013) and Assistant Professor of public policy in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001-2006). He received a Ph.D. (2000) in Engineering Systems and a M.S. (1996) in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a B.S.E. (1988) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.