👋🏽 Hi there, I’m Joel!

I am a Sr. Market Design Specialist with PJM Interconnection in Philadelphia, PA. My work focuses on changes to the co-optimized energy and ancillary service markets to improve price formation and economic dispatch based on the dynamic flexiblity and operational needs of the grid, including proposals for comprehensive reforms to reserve services in PJM’s day-ahead and real-time markets.

Previously, I was an electricity market design engineer III with Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) in Carmel, Indiana, primarily focused on the reformulation of the capacity market to incorporate seasonal reliability-based demand curves; these curves associate a marginal reliability value with demand in the MISO North/Central and South subregions based on the incremental reliability impacts of unforced capacity. From Summer 2022 through Spring 2024, I was a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, amidst the scenery of the Sonoran desert. I did my PhD at the University of Florida in beautiful Gainesville with Sean Meyn on the distributed control of flexible loads for balancing the electricity grid: Dissertation

My research interests are at the intersection of control, optimization, and reinforcement learning, with an emphasis on applications to power systems. The range of technical topics includes deterministic reinforcement learning in continuous time, control of Markov processes, model predictive control, and numerical optimization. I am particularly interested in decision making across different timescales driven by forecast information for resource allocation in the electricity grid.

During my PhD, I performed multiple internships at Electric Power Engineers, LLC in Austin, Texas, with a particular focus on the development of a general deep learning framework for load forecasting across different timescales and regions: the software tool showed remarkable accuracy in forecasting on time horizons ranging from a few hours to a month, as well as across different distribution networks.

Following the winter storm and the subsequent blackouts in Texas in February 2021, my colleagues and I wrote an op-ed in Utility Dive warning against the blind application of real-time and surge pricing in the power grid.

Research Interests

• Smart Electricity Grids
  • Regulation and dispatch of distributed energy resources
  • Optimization and control for grid reliability and renewable energy integration
  • Energy policy and power systems economics
• Control theory
  • Stochastic and deterministic optimal control
  • Reinforcement learning and data-driven control
  • Model predictive control
  • Robust control
• Markov chains