ORNL economist honored at international hydropower conference

(Press-News.org) Researcher Rocio Uria-Martinez was named one of four “Women with Hydro Vision” at this year’s  HYDROVISION International 2024 conference taking place in Denver this week. Awarded by a committee of industry peers, the honor recognizes women who use their unique talents and vision to improve and advance the worldwide hydropower industry. 

Uria is an energy and environmental economist and senior R&D staff member at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She is the lead author of the U.S. Hydropower Market Report, a definitive and influential study published by the DOE Water Power Technologies Office that details industry trends. 

Uria’s work at ORNL is wide-ranging and broadly centered on modeling energy systems and markets. She has conducted targeted research that analyzed the effects of climate change on federal hydropower, modeled pumped storage hydropower operations and revenue, and studied cost allocation in multipurpose hydropower projects. She also develops optimization models to provide insight into how alternative energy sources, such as biofuels, may impact the larger market as they are integrated into the existing transportation fuel pool.

Uria has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Oviedo in northern Spain. She received her doctorate in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Davis in 2007. She joined ORNL in 2010 after three years in the private sector, where she worked as an energy market analyst for a multinational electric utility company based in Bilbao, Spain.

The other three honorees include Isha Shrestha, a hydropower executive in Nepal; Rebecca Simpson, an engineering manager at the Grant Public Utility District in north-central Washington state; and Priscilla Dornas, senior engineering manager at a Brazilian hydropower company.

The four were recognized at a lunch during the HYDROVISION International conference on July 17. They are the tenth class of winners to be chosen since the Women with Hydro Vision awards program was created in 2014.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

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