Abstract: The widespread adoption of rooftop solar raises critical questions about equitable access to energy. While those with solar panels reduce their net consumption and electricity bill, the grid operating costs are shifted to those lacking the financial means or facing physical barriers to installing private solar systems. This talk explores strategies for achieving equitable access to renewable energy through an energy community that shares distributed energy resources among members of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. We propose a decentralized approach where a nonprofit operator broadcasts community prices of electricity designed to maximize the community welfare subject to an equitable energy access constraint, and community members optimize individual consumption based on the broadcasted prices. We show that the optimal community pricing achieves all points on the Pareto front of the equity-efficiency tradeoff, and every community member is economically better off within the community than being outside under the regulated utility rate of electricity.
Bio: Lang Tong is the Irwin and Joan Jacob Professor of Engineering at Cornell University and the Site Director of the Power System Engineering Research Center. His current research focuses on power system optimizations, electricity markets, and AI/machine learning technologies for power system operations. He received a B.E. in Automation from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. A Fellow of IEEE, he was the 2018 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Alternative Energy.