Adequacy assessment and capacity mechanisms - where maths meets policy

Wed, 21 October 2020

13:00 – 14:00 BST

Adequacy assessment and capacity procurement is a very prominent issue in industry and government. It is also an area where practice needs to be guided closely by the mathematical structure of the underlying probabilistic risk calculations – doing in an important practical application something which is mathematically unnatural is asking for trouble.

This talk will cover a number of areas market design must be informed by how the modelling can reflect the interests of decision makers, including: design of capacity markets to include all technologies on a common basis; the extent to which standard risk-neutral expected value match policy or societal interests; and the role of probabilistic and other quantifications of uncertainty. This will be a talk about mathematics, rather than one which requires a deep knowledge of technical mathematics to follow.

Chris Dent has been Professor of Industrial Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh since August 2020, having joined the School as Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader in 2016. He read Mathematics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before studying for his PhD in Theoretical Physics at Loughborough and spending four years as a Physics postdoc at Heriot-Watt and Marburg Universities. In 2005-6 he studied for the MSc in Operational Research at Edinburgh, and spent the subsequent ten years as a postdoc (Edinburgh and Durham Universities) and then academic (Durham) in energy systems modelling.

His principle research interests lie in methodology for security of supply risk analysis, and in large scale techno-economic modelling of energy systems - he also takes a much broader interest in energy systems analysis, including statistical modelling for reliability assessment, optimization of power system operation, energy system planning, integrated energy systems, renewable resource modelling, and the use of modelling evidence in policy and planning decisions. His most prominent industrial work has been in assisting National Grid with design of the GB Electricity Capacity Assessment Study since 2011.

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