Energy Systems Planning

Energy systems are massive, uncertain, and increasingly shaped by renewables that don't behave like the fossil plants the grid was built around — this course is about how to make planning and operational decisions in that messy setting using OR tools you've already seen in the IE core. You'll forecast demand and supply, build optimization models for generation, transmission, and capacity expansion, reason about storage and intermittency under uncertainty, and work through case studies via homework, a project, and a report. It pulls together optimization, stochastic modeling, and time series into a domain where the modeling choices have real climate and reliability stakes, making it a natural senior-level application elective for students drawn to energy, sustainability, or infrastructure-scale problems.