Past Events and Seminars

  Abstract: The integration of accurate spatially-resolved air quality-related human health impacts into electricity planning and dispatching decisions has been hampered by the computational burden required to model complex atmospheric physics and chemistry and its coupling with atmospheric transport.  By integrating a reduced form of a fully-coupled atmospheric model within a unit commitment optimization model, we allow for the first time a fully dynamical approach towards electricity planning that accurately and rapidly minimizes both cost and health impacts. We use the new capability in a case study of the state of Georgia over the years of 2004 – 2011, and show that a shift in utilization among existing power plants during selected hourly periods could have provided a health cost savings of $175.9 million dollars for an additional electricity generation cost of $83.6 million in 2007 US dollars (USD2007). The case study illustrates how air pollutant health impacts can be cost-effectively minimized by intelligently modulating power plant operations over multi-hour periods, without implementing additional emissions control technologies.

Bio:  Dr. Joel Sokol is a Fouts Family Associate Professor in ISyE, and Director of Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics degree. His primary research interests are in sports analytics and applied operations research. He has worked with teams or leagues in all three of the major American sports. Dr. Sokol’s LRMC method for predictive modeling of the NCAA basketball tournament is an industry leader, and his non-sports research has won the EURO Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize. Dr. Sokol has also won recognition for his teaching and curriculum development from IIE and the NAE, and s the recipient of Georgia Tech’s highest awards for teaching. He currently serves as INFORMS Vice President of Education, and is a past Chair and founding officer of the INFORMS section on sports operations research. Dr. Sokol’s PhD in operations research is from MIT, and his bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, computer science, and applied sciences in engineering are from Rutgers University.