Ross Baldick PhD
Ross Baldick PhD provides strategic consulting to the electricity industry. Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas, he is the author of "Applied Optimization: Formulation and Algorithms for Engineering Systems."
Category Archives: research
Applied Optimization book: new and improved!
Last summer, when I was visiting the University of Cambridge to present a seminar, I happened upon the university press bookstore. And what did I find inside? A hardback copy of my 2006 book, Applied Optimization. Even if you are … Continue reading
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Smart grid: let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater
Despite the end-of-school-year mania, I managed to get away to the 2017 IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies conference in Washington, DC, in late April, to talk about the Smart Grid grad course that I was wrapping up at UT. I … Continue reading
Pumping water uphill: storing energy without batteries
It’s been my pleasure for the past several years to supervise a senior design project in my Electrical and Computer Engineering department at The University of Texas at Austin. The project is aimed at avoiding battery storage in off-grid solar applications … Continue reading
John Goodenough, batteries, and steam trains
My wife and I often enjoy BBC documentaries, and historian Dan Snow is a favorite host. In his series about the history of railways in England, he observed that, as the industrial revolution increased manufacturing in England, there was a … Continue reading
ERCOT: meeting the challenges of wind integration
Texas has, by far, the highest penetration of wind among the three main US interconnections (Eastern, Western, and Texas), and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has met the challenges of wind integration. ERCOT is set to get even … Continue reading
Renewables research collaboration in Chile
In May I had the pleasure of visiting colleagues at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and the Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, Chile. Like Texas, Chile is moving toward ever higher levels of renewable power, ours in wind, theirs … Continue reading
Research updates on average rate charging
At the recent IEEE Power and Energy Society meeting in Austin, I presented updated work on electric vehicle charging by Mahdi Kefayati PhD, a recent graduate of my UT research group. Building on earlier research results, recent updates include more … Continue reading
There’s more than one way to deal with a duck (curve)
The good news is: solar. The bad news is: uncontrollable rooftop solar. How do we utilize the production of rooftop solar in the middle of the day? This is an especially significant problem for California. The California ISO coined the … Continue reading →