I Have Moved!

Hi all, I know it’s been a LONG time since I’ve posted on this blog! I have a major life update: I recently accepted an offer from Iowa State University to begin a PhD program in electrical engineering. I will begin working as a research assistant in May and start taking classes in August. My research will focus on capacity expansion planning to make the electric grid more resilient to severe weather events.

I’ve become increasingly interested in this sphere as I’ve worked as a meteorologist and energy trader during severe weather events, particularly during heat waves, arctic outbreaks, or any other pattern that causes high demand, low renewables production, and extremely high net loads and power pricing. One event that stands out is when I was trading on September 6, 2022, when the California ISO set its all-time record load of 52,061 MW and declared an Energy Emergency Alert Level 3, alerting utilities to prepare for rotating power outages. Thankfully, rotating power outages were avoided, but the event laid clear the vulnerability of and inefficiencies within our grid to severe weather events.

Capacity expansion planning is essentially “planning” the grid based on a series of constraints and optimized for one or more variables (usually cost). It co-locates electric generation, transmission, and distribution lines based on the different constraints. It does this on top of the existing grid but has the ability to retire plants as well based on constraints (uneconomic, dirty, aging, etc).

My blogs going forward will focus a lot more on power systems and the utility industry, as well as general life experiences and reflections of a PacNW native pursuing grad school in the Midwest after spending time in industry. As a result, I’ve decided to move my blog to charliephillips.me to reflect the more interdisciplinary nature of topics going forward. I will keep this blog online and will continue to work on hosting/updating the WeatherTogether network, especially because I still have my weather models running on the servers here and would like to keep those up.

Thanks for all your support over the years and feel free to stop on by to the new site. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog posts over there to get a new email every time one is sent! The form for subscribing is on the right sidebar (computer) or towards the bottom of the page, after all my “recent posts” section.