Stuart Morrison is a Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics. Morrison’s project will find optimal ways to manage electricity grids with high levels of renewables to support the clean energy transition. This would allow renewables to be used to their full potential and advance the transition to renewable-powered electricity grids.

What led you to want to study and research environmental solutions?

Stuart Morrison: My background is in electricity market regulation and design, and I believe electricity markets have a vital role to play in affecting climate change and other environmental outcomes. In electricity markets, there's an important role for effective policy and regulation that can coordinate different players across society to end up with a result that's better for the environment and the economy.

Can you tell us about the project you're working on?

Stuart Morrison: I'm looking at the different engineering needs that renewables have in our electricity markets that go alongside the need for solar and wind farms and I’m aiming to find an optimal way to make sure these needs are met. Renewable-powered grids have additional engineering needs to make sure they’re safe and reliable, compared to the grids of the past. To put this in an analogy, transitioning our electricity markets is like converting gasoline-powered cars to electric vehicles. It's not enough to replace the engine with a battery, which would be equivalent to installing a solar farm. You need to replace the drive train, the electronic systems, and the brakes to work as one cohesive system.

What I'm looking at is how we coordinate meeting these needs between the different market players - the generators, the power, the network providers, and the regulators - to provide these needs that help enable the transition. We're trying to convert our power system while we still want to be resilient. We don't want to go through blackouts while we're making this transition. A lot of different systems across the world are grappling with these engineering needs in sort of a piecemeal fashion. California is grappling with something called reactive power, which is one element of this broader set. Australia is grappling with other particular needs. There hasn't been a universal system to provide everything that renewables need to enable this transition, alongside the generation capacity and wind and solar. That's what I'm working on now is how do we invest or operationalize all these extra needs in a universal way to support the renewable transition alongside just the generation capacity itself.

What are your most significant research accomplishments?

Stuart Morrison: I'm thinking about ways to design regulations that help support the transition toward having renewable-powered electricity markets. Everyone is affected by these issues of how we design our power markets and electricity markets to handle the transition towards renewables. Designing something in this space is something that can have worldwide effects across the entire world because everyone is grappling with these problems. Hopefully, I'm working on policies that can provide a solution that's practicable and actionable by policymakers. 

What are the short and long-term goals you hope to achieve with your research?

Stuart Morrison: In the short term, I want to be able to provide solutions that policymakers can look at for inspiration when designing their regulation policy to help enable the renewable transition. This is the starting point of a longer, decades-long project. The problem we have in electricity markets is we're often reactive to the newest need. Ideally, in the long term, I want to have a research pipeline that looks forward and deals with a lot of the issues that come up before they arise in our power markets, so policymakers can get on the front foot and help design our regulation and policies that help enable this before we have to deal with the problems themselves.

How has your research influenced your thinking?

Stuart Morrison: The big change in my thinking, since I began this research, is how many different players you need to coordinate with when designing policies of this nature. Each of these players also have different incentives, or things they want to achieve. Consumers want reliable and cheap power, but policymakers also want to enable renewables or have other environmental goals, and sometimes those aims are at odds with one another. One thing that's changed is thinking about how all of the different stakeholders in our system interact with one another and trying to find compromises or solutions where everyone is at least a little better off. 

Walk us through your day-to-day as a researcher.

Stuart Morrison: Much of my research is based on data analysis, looking at how different generators, both renewables and fossil fuel generators, work and interact in our electricity markets. That helps me understand what's happening and will provide insight into areas that need to be fixed, areas that need more support for renewables, or areas where fossil fuel generators can help renewables. Much of my day at the moment is working on data analysis, understanding the dynamics of our day-to-day electricity systems, and reading and getting to terms with what our policymakers and regulators are working on. I'm reading their regulatory decisions and getting up to speed with the thinking and problems they're dealing with, and trying to map my research to them. 

What are your thoughts on California's electrical grid at the moment?

Stuart Morrison: California is one of the leaders in enabling renewables, but they're dealing with a lot of problems that go along with that. We're seeing a lot of congestion in some parts of the grid and under supply in other parts of the grid, happening at different times of the day. I think it's to be commended with how much change our grid operators, our generators, our network providers are all dealing with on a day-to-day basis to keep our supply relatively reliable. I don't envy anyone who works in the California grid, I think they have a momentous task in terms of dealing with the incorporation of renewables and everything that goes along with that.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Stuart Morrison: I'd also like to talk about the time scales in which all of these transitions are going to take place. I think we have an idea that in 30 years, 40 years time, we're going to have a renewable, centric power system, but there's going to be decades of lead up to that where we are going to see a lot of momentous change, and how we go through the next 10 to 20 years is going to affect where we end up in 30 years time. If we can handle our transition well and design policy that enables us to have a smooth transition, we're going to be in a much better spot in 30 years time. If we underinvest now, it's going to stall our transition further into the future, and we're going to be in a worse space in terms of underinvestment and reliability in the future because of it. I think where we end up is dependent on the next 10-20 years or so, in terms of making sure we're coordinating between all of our players and our markets.