Operations Research in Energy and Environment Issues
Bora Kat
Addressing global warming and its multifaceted challenges requires an urgent structural transformation of the energy and specifically the electricity sector alongside deep industrial decarbonization. This rapid transition, however, introduces novel technical and economic challenges, creating a critical need for advanced modeling approaches capable of capturing complex system dynamics. In the power sector, the high penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, brings operational complexities that increase the need for system flexibility through energy storage technologies and demand-side management. Simultaneously, on the policy front, both formulating effective transition strategies under technical constraints and quantifying the economic and sectoral impacts of implemented or planned regulatory measures -such as carbon pricing and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)- necessitate robust, model-based quantitative analyses. This seminar provides an integrated overview of how Operations Research (OR) and mathematical modeling guide energy policy design and impact assessment, pairing methodological frameworks directly with empirical applications from the speaker’s research portfolio and national sectoral roadmap studies. Following the analytical spectrum from macroeconomic to engineering-level representations, Input-Output (I-O) and Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) frameworks are covered, alongside Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models -including their top-down and bottom-up integration with power sector models- to evaluate the economy-wide impacts of national climate commitments, Paris Agreement targets, Emissions Trading Systems (ETS), and cross-border trade measures like CBAM. Moving to power sector optimization, high-resolution Generation Expansion Planning (GEP) model is addressed through studies on renewable energy integration, storage deployment, and Demand Response (DR) mechanisms. Furthermore, bottom-up energy system and sectoral decarbonization models are featured through large-scale optimization frameworks designed to assess technology transitions, investment requirements, and CBAM/ETS cost implications for Türkiye’s 2053 net-zero pathways in the steel and fertilizer sectors.
Short Bio
Bora Kat received his BS, MS and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering, all from METU. He worked as a research assistant at the same department between 2002 and 2006. He studied dynamic scheduling of multi-class base-stock controlled stochastic inventory systems in MS and Energy-Economy-Environment Modeling in PhD. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Boston, USA) as a Fulbright scholar in 2016- 2017 and was a visiting researcher at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW, Mannheim, Germany) in the last quarter of 2024. As a part time lecturer, he taught environmental economics at METU ESS (Earth System Science) Program and has been supervising graduate students since 2012. His main affiliation is with The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), where he has been working since 2006.
His main research interests are large-scale energy-economy-environment models, applied general equilibrium models and input-output models for economic assessment of environmental policies, modeling electricity day ahead markets, generation expansion planning (GEP) models and operations research in energy sector.
Venue
Friday, October 23, 2026, 4.00 pm
IE Building, Halim Doğrusöz Auditorium (IE 03)