  There is growing interest in understanding how interactions between
system-wide objectives and local community decision-making will impact the
clean energy transition. The concept of energysheds has gained traction in the
areas of public policy and social science as a way to study these
relationships. However, development of technical definitions of energysheds
that permit system analysis are still largely missing. In this work, we propose
a mathematical definition for energysheds, and introduce an analytical
framework for studying energyshed concepts within the context of future
electric power system operations. This framework is used to develop insights
into the factors that impact a community's ability to achieve energyshed policy
incentives within a larger connected power grid, as well as the tradeoffs
associated with different spatial policy requirements. We also propose an
optimization-based energyshed policy design problem, and show that it can be
solved to global optimality within arbitrary precision by employing concepts
from quasi-convex optimization. Finally, we investigate how interconnected
energysheds can cooperatively achieve their objectives in bulk power system
operations.
