Ezra's Round Table / Systems Seminar: Madhur Srivastava (Cornell Chemistry)

Description

Subscription-based Electricity Pricing: A Community-focused Approach

Higher energy prices and wide-spread blackouts are increasingly becoming common due to limited supply of electricity, as communities are transitioning to renewable energy sources. Many solutions focus on technological advancement; however, community-focused consumption moderation is one of the most effective ways to address the problem. It reduces overall electricity consumption, increase the share of green energy and moderates the electricity prices. Our community partner, Avangrid (the parent company of NYSEG), wants to moderate electricity prices for several neighborhoods in Northeast, including Ithaca, and avoid blackouts by reducing the peak load. This will avoid costly and time-consuming infrastructure upgrades, as well as further reduce greenhouse gas emissions attributable to construction. This project develops a subscription-based electricity pricing tiers by personalizing electricity consumption profiles with the substation load throughput for each household, company and industry. It will lead to efficient shift in energy usage to a different time of a day by enacting behavior change among users with substantial reduction in electricity bills. The data-driven approach is based on five years of high temporal-resolution electricity consumption data provided by Avangrid for 300k users.
 

Bio:
Dr. Madhur Srivastava is an assistant research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, where he is leading The Signal Science Lab. His research focusses on developing fundamental data processing methods and advanced computational workflow to tackle problems in 1) sustainable energy systems to reduce blackouts, moderate electricity consumption and plan infrastructure upgrade, 2) disease diagnosis to detect biomarkers at early stages (e.g. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS), 3) drug discovery and development to analyze composition in the molecular mixtures, and 4) molecular biophysics to determine the dynamics of biomolecules, such as proteins, for understanding disease mechanism. Dr. Srivastava's research pursues a synergistic interface among the disciplines of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Economics, Physical Sciences and Life Sciences, aimed at technology development and commercialization, following the “lab-to-market” approach. Before joining as a faculty, Dr. Srivastava completed M.Eng. (2012) and Ph.D. (2018) degrees in electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering, respectively, from Cornell University. Dr. Srivastava is recipient of many academic and service awards, and his research papers are frequently selected as feature articles in journals and among the editor's choice papers.