Yonatan Bar-Shoham

Yonatan Bar-Shoham is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Dynamic Uncertainty, where his work applies stochastic control and real-options methods to the economics of seawater desalination and the broader water-energy nexus. He holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology (Grand Water Research Institute), where his doctoral research formulated the capacity expansion of seawater reverse-osmosis systems as a stochastic dynamic programme over coupled energy-price and freshwater-inflow shocks. The thesis derived the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation governing optimal capacity additions for a planner committed irreversibly to membrane modules and pretreatment infrastructure under unresolved drought and electricity-price uncertainty, and established conditions under which the optimal expansion rule admits a free-boundary characterisation in the joint state space of inflow stress and spot power prices.

During his doctorate, Bar-Shoham conducted operational research at IDE Technologies — the engineering firm responsible for the Sorek and Hadera SWRO plants — where he obtained and analysed plant-level data on energy consumption, fouling cycles, and chemical usage as functions of feedwater conditions, feeding these empirical regularities back into the theoretical capacity-expansion model. A separate consulting engagement with the Innovation Division of Mekorot, Israel's national water company, applied his scheduling framework to the day-ahead arbitrage problem faced by an operator of multiple SWRO plants under the volatile spot prices that have characterised the Israeli electricity market since the 2018 reform. This work produced an operational tool for the joint optimisation of permeate storage, membrane wear, and energy-cost minimisation.

At IADU, Bar-Shoham contributes to the Sustainability and Energy Economics Division's research strand on water-energy coupling, with particular focus on the construction of shadow-price decompositions for jointly scarce resources, the formulation of aquifer depletion as a Bermudan-style real options problem in which replenishment capex is exercised against the option value of conserving stock, and the differential-game analysis of cross-border water trade under climate-driven supply variability. His work supports the Institute's research output for sovereign water authorities, finance ministries with desalination portfolios, and regional bodies engaged in the design of cooperative water-sharing arrangements.