Mr. Garrison earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin (UT) in 2007, 2009, and 2014, respectively. Currently beginning a PostDoc with ETH Zurich, Jared has maintained an excellent academic record while devoting a significant amount of time and energy to his numerous leadership, volunteer, research and publication activities.
As concerns about global warming, carbon costs, and energy independence are growing, utilities are seeking to implement more carbon-free, renewable energy systems. However, the intermittency of wind and solar power is a major obstacle that energy producers and suppliers are currently burdened with. The additional risks of unexpected interruptions and mismatch with demand have hindered the expansion of these two primary renewable resources. Jared's current research utilizes precise models of electricity system economic dispatch in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) that include features such as capacity availability, sophisticated treatment of combined heat and power (CHP) plants, emissions and water use rates, and important generator operational constraints such as minimum run times and startup costs. These models are used to investigate the impacts of high wind power penetration, to explore the operation of energy storage in various future market conditions, and to assess the economic and environmental impacts of energy storage. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is selected for analysis in this work because of its competitive costs, storage capacity, and suitability for deployment in the ERCOT service area. This work follows from his masters research, which included both a thermodynamic and economic model of a novel energy storage configuration in order to quantify the systems performance parameters and economic attractiveness.