Marissa Hummon is a senior energy scientist with Tendril, a provider of customer-facing software to the energy industry, based in Boulder, Colorado. Previously, she spent five years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the Energy Analysis group. She earned her BA in Physics from Colorado College and her PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University. Marissa started her career in grid integration of renewables by looking at some of the core problems with modeling the intermittency and variability of renewable technologies. Before joining Tendril she worked on quantifying the value of demand response and storage technologies in wholesale electricity markets. At Tendril she is leading the development of a residential demand response product that balances the home owner’s comfort and the utilities’ production costs.
Although it’s clear enough that energy transition is necessary and reasonable, and although we know that transition is mainly happening on the grid at first, there is still much uncertainty about exactly where on the grid different strategies can be tried, how much they can accomplish, and what they’ll cost, relative to the alternatives….not to mention how the rest of the grid will respond as different measures—like storage, demand response, rooftop solar, controlled dispatch, and so on—are implemented. What’s needed to answer all these difficult questions? Better models, including serious math, by serious researchers.
Fortunately, one of those researchers is willing and able to explain several years of her work in grid modeling at NREL and elsewhere. So tune in and put on your thinking caps, because this episode (Geek Rating 10!) is not for the faint of heart.