Rocio Uria-Martinez brings her background in resource economics and her interest in renewable energy to her work assessing key trends in the hydropower industry.
Tell us about your research and its impacts on hydropower.
One thing I'm working on right now is putting together what will be the fourth edition of the Hydropower Market Report. This is a report that goes over the trends in the US hydropower fleet and industry, covering what's happening in the development pipeline, the performance metrics of the existing fleet, what kinds of revenue streams hydropower plants are getting, and supply chain topics. Another really cool project that I had the chance to participate in was one in which we look at the effects of climate change on the federal hydropower fleet.
My work helps highlight the role of hydropower in today's grid and its importance for the decarbonized grid of tomorrow. We will need flexible, dispatchable, clean energy generation such as hydropower provides to complement the large amounts of solar and wind that we are expecting to have going forward.
What keeps you motivated?
What keeps me motivated is thinking that what I do contributes in in a small way towards the large process of decarbonization, moving from fossil fuels to clean electricity.
What does it mean to you to be a female in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)?
It contributes to having a diverse group of people defining the priorities for R&D and carrying out the R&D and that, in my opinion, increases the chances of what comes out of that R&D will serve society as a whole.
What would you tell a female student considering a career in water power research and development?
This industry needs you, and there are a lot of exciting things to do in hydropower, from managing the assets we already have, which are really important, to developing new types of turbines, new fish passage options to mitigate the impacts of hydropower and enhance its good attributes, such as flexibility.
This research is supported by the Water Power Technologies Office in the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.