Three Essays on Sustainable Operations: Renewable Energy Procurement, Battery Storage, and Equitable Work Scheduling

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays on sustainable operations management. The essays study how operational decisions shape both environmental outcomes and social outcomes in settings characterized by uncertainty, strategic interaction, and competing stakeholder objectives. Together, they examine three domains central to sustainable operations: renewable energy procurement, battery storage dispatch, and equitable workforce scheduling. The first essay studies collective power purchase agreements for corporate renewable electricity procurement. Although power purchase agreements have become an important vehicle for financing renewable energy projects, small and medium-sized corporate buyers often lack the demand scale, expertise, or bargaining power to contract independently. The essay develops a generalized Nash bargaining framework to compare separate negotiation, consortium-based joint negotiation, and agent-based negotiation. The analysis shows that, under risk neutrality, all three mechanisms induce the same renewable project size, so the choice of negotiation architecture primarily affects surplus allocation and buyer participation rather than capacity expansion. When buyers are risk averse, project size may increase or decrease depending on the balance between hedging benefits and market-risk exposure, while renewable energy certificate banking increases the marginal value of capacity. The results provide guidance for when joint negotiation should serve as the default and when agent-based negotiation may be preferred for weak or asymmetric buyer coalitions. The second essay studies battery dispatch in electricity markets with negative prices. It develops a tractable dynamic programming framework that embeds the forecasting state directly into the dispatch problem and solves the state-of-charge dimension exactly on an endogenous event grid. Using matched synthetic experiments and out-of-sample tests in California’s real-time electricity market, the essay compares stochastic dynamic programming with open-loop certainty-equivalent planning and rolling deterministic reoptimization. The results show that stochastic control creates substantial value relative to open-loop planning, but its advantage over deterministic reoptimization is selective rather than universal. In particular, the value of stochastic look-ahead depends on forecast-error dependence, market uncertainty, and storage duration. The essay further identifies operational signals that can support a switching rule between stochastic and deterministic controllers. The third essay turns to social sustainability in service operations by studying disparities in the temporal quality of workers’ schedules. Using granular shift, transaction, and customer-review data from an American restaurant chain, the essay examines scheduling sufficiency and predictability across gender and racial groups. The analysis shows that women and minority workers receive fewer initially scheduled hours and more last-minute shift additions than White male workers, even after accounting for role, tenure, absenteeism, and multidimensional measures of worker ability. Further analyses suggest that these disparities are not fully explained by worker preferences or availability; instead, they point to systematic under-scheduling and unequal exposure to unpredictable work. Across the three essays, the dissertation shows that sustainable operations require more than efficiency-oriented optimization. In renewable procurement, sustainable outcomes depend on mechanisms that align incentives and preserve participation. In storage operations, they depend on dispatch policies that use information effectively under uncertainty. In workforce scheduling, they depend on managerial processes that allocate operational flexibility fairly. By combining analytical modeling, dynamic programming, and empirical analysis, this dissertation contributes tools and evidence for designing operations that are environmentally responsible, economically viable, and socially equitable.