By Ernie Tucker
Growing up on her family’s farm in eastern Ohio, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Group Manager for Price Signals for Grid Services Bethany Frew learned fundamental lessons that have sustained her to this day.
“I appreciate the upbringing,” she said. “I know where food comes from. You watch something grow from a tiny seed in January to something the size of a bush in August.”
She absorbed natural cycles, rhythms, and connections—as well as the disciplines of hard work and responsibility.
Together with her veterinarian dad and nurse mother, Frew and her brother would spend the summers caring for sheep, baling hay, picking corn, harvesting vegetables, and selling produce from their 75-acre farmstead. Every day when her parents came home from their jobs, there was more work.
“We didn’t really go on vacations,” she recalled. “There were two trips we took when I was very young. After that, we would try to go on a short trip, and every time, coyotes would get into the sheep or some bad thing would happen, and we’d have to rush back to the farm.”
She said most farmers know their livelihoods depend on proper land stewardship. On a farm, “you have to take care of the land.” Sustainability was woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Frew returns to her home every fall, helping her family harvest and sell produce and working with her mother to make jam and salsa from freshly picked fruits and vegetables. Her ties to the land remain. Even today, she and her husband maintain an urban garden not far from NREL’s Golden, Colorado, campus that bursts with tomatoes, herbs, melons, peas, and other produce. Her bond with the soil remains strong.
And in turn, farming became a springboard to her pursuit of renewable energy and launched her journey to NREL.
In high school, as a member of 4-H and the National FFA Organization, Frew learned that there were many opportunities available to land stewards, including engineering. So, when she attended Ohio State University, a family tradition, she opted for a major that combined engineering and agriculture.
She began looking at ways to produce energy from waste. Her honors research explored microbial fuel cells, and she studied biofuels through extracurricular student clubs. But she realized that these technologies would be difficult to scale up. Then she started reading about another option: wind and solar power.
“I didn’t know anything about solar and wind energy at the time, but as I started reading and learning about them, I realized they could have a huge impact,” she said. That idea sprouted, and she found fertile ground at Stanford University, which had launched a program in renewable energy and its interplay with atmospheric science.
After receiving several fellowships, she entered Stanford, first earning her master’s degree and then her Ph.D. in 2014. It was there that she was introduced to computational modeling. “That’s where I learned coding,” she said about the science that opened the door to modeling approaches that can look at energy systems.
She also met two at-the-time NREL employees, Michael Milligan and Patrick Sullivan. Although Frew said that she had heard of NREL as an undergrad and thought “it was a cool place,” she never imagined that she would end up at the laboratory. Meeting Milligan and Sullivan changed that—the three corresponded, and Milligan and Sullivan arranged for Frew to join NREL as a postdoc.
NREL Blooms for Bethany
In her postdoc position, Frew split her time working in Milligan’s group (then called the Transmission and Grid Integration group) and working in the Center for Strategic Energy Analysis.
“She developed a deep understanding of many of the important concepts because she always wanted to ensure that she saw how the various puzzle pieces are related,” Milligan said.
Others also took note of her grasp of the interconnectedness of issues.
Senior Research Fellow Paul Denholm noted, “When Bethany started at NREL, she immediately engaged in what I still believe is one of the most analytically challenging aspects of power system analysis—the impact of wholesale market design on the evolution of the grid.”
For Frew, even though she described her career as “a meandering stream,” each part is connected, with smaller tributaries leading into bigger outlets.
“There’s been an evolution going back to when I was in high school,” she said. Interest in sustainability in high school led to a pursuit of agricultural engineering in undergrad, which flowed into questions about wind and solar energy. That led to grad school, where she developed skills in modeling the grid integration of renewables to put all those elements together. Systems analysis remains the common link.
“I’m very much a systems thinker—so the systems approach has been a continuous thread through all of this,” she said.
Because of this systems approach, her questions spawn other questions: How do we put all this together? How does this one thing impact the other? What are the feedback effects across the whole system?
Things bump up against each other. “I enjoy working with the interfaces,” she said. “That has led me to developing different analysis and computational pursuits over the years.”
As a manager of the Price Signals for Grid Services group in the Grid Planning and Analysis Center, she oversees a team of power system modelers focused on bulk and retail electricity market and rate structures to support grid services. Her personal portfolio explores how wholesale electricity market structures can support resource adequacy.
She enjoys mentoring and sharing her broad background, which she has acquired over time.
“It's been a long time coming—building up different skill sets and areas,” she said. She began by modeling long-term capacity expansion buildouts—decades into the future—of the U.S. system. Then, she investigated production cost modeling—how to most economically and reliability operate that system. She then made more connections.
For example, Frew thought about energy and operating reserve compensation mechanisms and how prices signaled the need for new resources to enter or even exit for grid needs. She cultivated thoughts about resource adequacy to understand whether the resources entering the grid could meet the projected load. “There has to be enough capacity and energy to keep the lights on,” she said.
As she added new elements, it yielded one idea: Each step is connected.
Humbly Modeling the Future
But Frew is humble about her profession. She is, of course, familiar with the now-overused observation by British statistician George Box: All models are wrong; some are useful.
Modeling is not predictive, in her opinion—at least not in an exact sense. “It is illustrative,” she said.
Her team can run large scenarios to explore what-ifs such as: What if this policy is implemented? What if costs go down? What if gas prices go up? What if there’s a cold snap?
Questions lead to more questions with an eye toward understanding situations better.
She noted that “there’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into these tools to characterize these what-ifs.”
The goal is to shed light on interactions between different energy components to inform decision makers about the best ways to plan and operate a grid system. The goal is to figure out what things matter most.
“That’s where we have the biggest opportunity for accelerating change in the right direction,” she said.
Frew is realistic about where to focus her efforts, too. Just as one does not grow pineapples in Ohio—at least not now—she does not expend her energy on areas that do not produce her best personal results.
“I don’t touch code anymore. There are others more savvy at coding than me. In the past, I hacked my way through it,” she laughed. Instead, she concentrates on casting vision, directing research by writing research proposals, conducting research analysis, and building and maintaining relationships with clients.
And she draws on her own experiences to try to understand how markets evolve. She knows that with all these different required grid services, there needs to be many different modeling domains that all come together in an integrated manner.
Looking ahead at the next five or 10 years, she realizes that the incredible rate of growth for installing renewable generation will create new challenges. Among the many, she sees transmission capacity as key.
The need for electricity appears enormous, yet she remains grounded and not overwhelmed.
Recently married to her husband, Steve, Frew said that she will continue to enjoy the bounty of their garden. And most likely they will continue to explore the cycles of life. Harvest time in September will likely find her in Ohio, helping to pick sweet corn and pumpkins.
“It’s a different world there than where I’m at now,” Frew said.
Yet there is a connection too. Just as farming is about learning to work with the land so it is there for future generations, so is her analysis about learning to see what is possible in order to get the best energy yield while caring for Earth.
Source : nrel.gov