Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...

Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...

Enhanced (or engineered) geothermal systems (EGS) for generating electricity may provide significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, if they can be successfully sited. One potential threat to that siting is induced seismicity, which has led to EGS projects being stopped in Switzerland...

We investigate the economic viability of coupling a wind farm with compressed air energy storage (CAES) to participate in the day-ahead electricity market at a time when renewable portfolio standards are not binding and wind competes freely in the marketplace. In our model, the CAES is used to...

A reconfigurable network can change its topology by opening and closing switches on power lines. We use real wind, solar, load, and cost data and a model of a reconfigurable distribution grid to show that reconfiguration allows a grid operator to reduce operational losses as well as to accept...

We develop a metric to quantify the sub-hourly variability cost of individual wind plants and show its use in valuing reductions in wind power variability. Our method partitions wind energy into hourly and sub-hourly components and uses corresponding market prices to determine variability costs....