From wholesale to retail: Sandhya’s journey in electricity markets
Sandhya with her dog pals
Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where our energy comes from. We plug into an outlet, flip a switch or connect a device without considering what spins where or exactly how electrons move to make our appliances whir or screens glow. But there are many energy professionals working hard behind the scenes to guarantee that the electrons we need light up our homes and power our lives exactly when we want them to, and for the right price too. Sandhya is one of those energy pros, and her impressive career has taken her from energy markets to storage to vehicle-to-everything and beyond. Here’s how she got there.
Shaped by early decisions
Sandhya didn’t exactly set out to become an energy expert – for her, “career choice came first, passion came later.” Where she’s from in India, students are expected to decide by tenth grade whether to pursue science (which may in turn lead to medicine or engineering), business or the arts. Although she found the idea of medicine intriguing, ultimately she “didn’t want to play with the lives of people firsthand,” so she chose sciences and then engineering, ultimately earning a Bachelors of Technology (BTch) in Electronics and Instrumentation, minoring in signals and controls and power systems engineering.
Her subsequent graduate education at IIT Chicago was a very “hands-on experience working with circuits” for signal and systems processing and control. As part of her graduate work, she took a course called “Deregulated Power System” that enumerated how the electric grid in the U.S. was restructured to introduce competition in the Electricity Markets, requiring students to optimize matching energy as a real-time commodity and price it like the stock exchange. In addition to studying the Electricity Markets, Sandhya also was passionate about exploring options around non-traditional energy resources and their integration into the present Electricity infrastructure. As part of her graduate education, Sandhya and a group of fellow students ran a case study to see if an energy system with cars running on hydrogen and buildings powered by wind/solar (battery tech wasn’t what it is now!) could be self-sustained with renewables.
The research was published in IEEE, viz. Case Studies of Economic Viability of Renewable Energy. Her work got her a role launching ancillary service markets at MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator), a nonprofit member organization that manages electricity for 45 million people in 15 states and Manitoba, enables $40 billion in annual energy market transactions and plans for the future of the grid. ISOs basically help plan how energy gets where it needs to go, logistically and financially, but they don’t generate energy or bill customers like utilities do. Ancillary services help support reliability and get energy from generation to demand centers, and can regulate load, support voltage and manage reserves. At MISO, Sandhya dealt with many tricky optimization problems and ushered in cool new product integrations, including bidirectional energy flows, asynchronous hydropower and integration of renewables (mostly wind) into day-ahead and real-time energy markets.
“Career choice came first, passion came later.”
Thinking ahead to change the game
At the time, it was hard for ISOs to figure out how to deal with small, intermittent resources, a challenge that persists but has improved. Sandhya’s work found that adding intermittent resources like wind into the day-ahead market helped with wind curtailment, getting more value out of the resource, and reduced max generation events that required slowing down other resources when wind was available. Initially, other distributed resources such as solar were often treated by markets as an offshoot of wind, and ISOs often hesitated to incorporate them into the mix because it wasn’t clear how the market would be changed to accommodate intermittencies. Small entities were hard to model, and energy markets were slow to add them. Adding these intermittent renewables was a sea change (hydro pun not intended) in how utilities operated.
FERC order 2222 finally clarified and gave a (much-needed) regulatory push on how DERs like renewables (and demand response, and energy efficiency) can participate in markets. The rule required ISOs to take distributed resources into account and paved the way for a lot of the work we’re doing today. Sandhya’s experience shows the back-and-forth interaction between innovation and policy at the cutting edge of energy markets – pretty cool to see!
Moving from client to vendor side
The ability to integrate DERs into markets led Sandhya to work with a consortium of GE Digital, MISO, ISONE and PJM to look at ISO systems and applications to bring digital transformation so resources like DERs could participate in the Energy Markets without necessitating the need to change overarching market rules. This investigation helped her look at the bigger picture, including understanding how DERs are performing in energy markets across the world. Following her energy market investigations, Sandhya built on her DER experience by working on Asset Performance Management and network operations for Stem, a battery storage company. Most recently, she’s joined an up-and-coming branch of “the GM mothership,” GM Energy, which has a “startup feel” and is setting up V2X capabilities, including V2G. Despite her deep expertise in all things energy, including being at the forefront of renewables and storage, Sandhya is still finding it a “humbling experience” to work with experts in this challenging field.
Pushing energy markets forward
Echoing others’ experiences, Sandhya has found the energy world to have an aging workforce and a culture where “experience is louder than academics,” sometimes leading workers to want to keep doing the same things they’ve always done and remaining closed to change. Although the perspective may be understandable, re-evaluating the composition of the Electric Grid to encourage inclusion of non-traditional energy resources should be at the forefront of our endeavors. It was “harder than expected” for Sandhya to sell the value of renewables in the wholesale markets: despite leadership support, it still took FERC rules and IRA mandates to make it happen.
Being a young woman in the utility world was also challenging, and Sandhya initially found it “very surprising” that her technical expertise was not as valued as her age or gender. Fortunately, she had a female hiring manager at her first job at MISO and very supportive colleagues who helped “pave the path” for her. Interestingly, in the first role she ever held in the corporate world as an Electricity Market Engineer, the long-term residents of the team were women (each with a tenure of 10+ years); men tended to move on more quickly, perhaps due to the dynamic demands of the role, which required “wearing a lot of hats,” exhibiting both technical and interpersonal skills.
“Bringing choice and independence to the consumer is what excites me most.”
Energizing energy
Part of the resistance to change in energy is due to the pace of change in different industries. While other technologies change rapidly, as we’ve seen with the internet and mobile phones, “power systems haven’t changed for 70 years,” and pressure to maintain reliability is high, fostering the idea that experience trumps all in this area. Still, Sandhya points out that “even from a capitalistic perspective, including smaller resources that are much more flexible and responsive is the way to go,” minimizing costs while optimizing performance. For Sandhya, “Bringing choice and independence to the consumer is what excites me most,” delivering the choice of provider and even the opportunity to make money from DERs at home.
By contrast, moving into the retail space and away from traditional utilities brought Sandhya into an encounter with greater diversity, giving her the ability to work with a broader set of people. Sandhya also has a young daughter and wants “to leave a better world for her.” Giving consumers choices about where their energy can come from can help push retail energy providers and network operators to display the financial and environmental responsibility that we need for a clean and livable future. In the next few years, she sees a lot of openness and opportunity “to be part of setting the regulatory policies” that will shape our clean energy future.
That’s a bright vision from someone who’s been at the cutting edge of energy for a long time. Are you ready to make it happen?
Lessons from Sandhya
Energy is an ever-evolving field, with a lot of opportunity for innovation
Consumer choice has the potential to reshape how energy works
The next few years are an open road and you could be part of setting key policies