My track co-chair Sérgio Ivan Lopes, Technology and Management School of the Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo (ESTG-IPVC), and I will be reaching out to many of you who can contribute to the subjects of interest. The contributions may also be remote/online. A paper track is planned, too, and I will be updating this announcement with submission and deadline details soon.
If you want to nominate yourself or someone you know as a contributor to the Energy & Power Vertical Track of the 2022 IEEE WF on IoT, please reach out. I will be delighted to have you!
NASPI was founded in 2003 as the Eastern Interconnection Phasor Project, it is funded by the US Dept. of Energy, and is supported by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). It is the largest collaboration of academics, industry practitioners and standardizing bodies for the development, use, understanding and promotion of methods and technologies based on synchronized measurements of voltage and current waveforms in power systems. These measurements with granularity of at least 30 per second and which are time synchronized via satellite across large grids, allow us to better analyze and control the stability and the security of the electrical grid.
Within the framework of DisTT, synchronized measurements enable the detection of faults, increase of hosting capacity of renewables, monitoring equipment health and others functions. At the current stage, DisTT focuses on the medium voltage beyond the substation.
This great opportunity and responsibility could not have been possible without the mentorship, support and inspiration that Sascha von Meier from UC Berkeley has gracefully offered me. I take over her role in leading DisTT in the hopes I can achieve half of what she did! Also, many thanks to Jeff Dagle (PNNL and chair of NASPI) for welcoming me on board.
I am thrilled to announce that the Editors in Chief of the IET Renewable Power Generation (RPG) journal, Prof. Infield and Prof. Tricoli, have invited me to serve as the inaugural Special Issues Editor for this publication. I assume this role immediately and further to those of the Regional Editor for North America and Associate Editor on the subject of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems for the same Open Access (OA) journal. It is particularly indicative of the Institute’s priorities that this is only the second IET publication in the field of energy and electrical power systems that is assigned with a Special Issues Editor.
Since the decarbonization of the energy sector is an aim long-overdue and particularly complicated, it requires the mobilization of several stakeholders in the academia, the industry and among the decision and policy makers. The role and the positioning of the IET RPG in this discussion is central in bringing stakeholders together as authors, reviewers and adopters of publications disseminating how renewable energy at the microscopic and macroscopic levels can fulfill the clean energy transition.
In my role as Special Issues Editor, I will be soliciting, organizing, overseeing, editing and managing thematic calls for papers at the intersection as also the periphery of IET RPG topics, supporting their Guest Editors and attracting prospective Authors. For those of you who know me, understand that my involvement will be hands-on, the Special Issues will be appropriately curated, and that the Guest Editors will have the full support of the RPG journal staff and the IET organization. I urge you to contact me with ideas and proposals, even though I will also be reaching out to many of you.
As I have stated previously, OA to the concepts and results of academic and industrial R&D is the corner-stone of promoting and disseminating crucial ideas and important scientific results in the times of urgent calls to action. In my view, the OA publications by the IEEE and the IET have been serving this mission with respect to the Authors and their work at the highest level of quality and with a dedicated pursuit for academic excellence. I am very proud to serve publications for both the IEEE and the IET!
Extending some of my previous work, I developed a digital twin for overhead conductors that detects an approaching forest fire and de-energizes the affected lines in a timely manner and not preemptively. The work has just been accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (preprint here).
Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) have been widely adopted across grids. PMUs may be installed along a line in distances as close as a 1-2 miles in between. This gives rise and basis to the idea of real-time monitoring of line impedance for any reasons of variation. As resistance increases with ambient temperature (not proportionally), steep decreases in the inductance/resistance ratio (tangent of the impedance phasor – tanδ in the figure) of an overhead conductor may indicate that a forest fire burns near said conductor and it should, thus, be disconnected.
Behavior of moving average of impedance phasor as a forest fire approaches an overhead conductor and affects its resistance. Such a behavior should control the disconnection of this conductor.
The in silico testing under numerous worst case scenario conditions (no solar heating effect, broad measurement error intervals, synchronization errors, etc.), showed that the proposed method detects some cases of a forest fire approaching a conductor, in sub-second times and at extremely low false positive rates. In the next steps, I plan a collaboration with interested utilities and the US Forest Service for field testing.
I want to thank CMU ECE’s MSc student (at that time) and co-author Uday Sriram for his help in setting up the tests, Dan Dietmeyer from SDG&E for informing me about PMU deployments in CA, Farnoosh Rahmatian from NuGrid Power for lending his expertise on instrument transformers and Jeff Dagle from PNNL for his crucial comments in the earlier stages of this work.
What we will be talking about revolves around how the electrical grid shifting to renewables and batteries, entails the shift to resources interfacing with the power system via power electronics – inverter, rectifiers and converters. As these devices and the sources they interface are characterized by fast dynamics, the traditional control paradigm followed to the day cannot suffice. The reason is that the phenomena that used to span seconds (thanks to large rotating inertias of conventional generators), will now be unfolding in milliseconds. Hence, the operators’ response times in the control rooms will be very limited. Thankfully, synchrophasors and the applications they enable can match these time-frames and allow for the transition to a new control paradigm.
I look forward to the conference and hope to be attending it in person in the beautiful town of Split in Croatia.
I am very excited with Dr. Liang Min‘s invitation to present my Smart Grid works on power system control with machine learning and artificial intelligence in the framework of the Bits & Watts Initiative at Stanford! The seminar will take place on Feb. 24th and I will go over the use of top-down heuristically inducted binary decision trees to procure firm capacity by renewables with volatility, and on how voltage control can be modeled as a problem of classical mechanics physics. I look forward to hearing attendees’ ideas and thoughts on other machine learning and AI applications in power system optimization, planning and control.
The seminar will be in-person, so if you are faculty, student & researcher at Stanford and would like us to meet before/after the seminar, please, do not hesitate to reach out!
During my visit I had the opportunity to make new friends from multiple departments and I want to thank everyone at Princeton for their kindness and hospitality!
I am very grateful to Dr. Yury Dvorkin for honoring me with an invitation to offer an ECE seminar at the Tandon School of Engineering at NYU coming Thursday Oct. 28th! I will talk about how our interest in distribution systems has been revived and, especially, in the challenges these networks face on a daily basis. I will point out the deep-rooted technical issues that remain unresolved when operating a distribution grid and the problematic incentives that have failed to make all end-customers more active within them. The digital twin of distribution transformers for detecting grid faults and the value proposition of hybrid photovoltaic-battery systems behind the meter of residential end-customers are two of the proposals I will discuss to address the aforementioned concerns.
The seminar will be held remotely, but if you are NYU faculty, researcher or student, feel free to reach out to arrange some online meeting on that day/afternoon.
Last updated March 2022 (originally published October 2021)
Update: The submissions deadline to the 16th IEEE International Conference on Compatibility, Power Electronics and Power Engineering (CPE-POWERENG 2022) has been extended April 11th. To submit your work follow the link found here. You can read more details about topics of interest as also about the timeliness of the subjects of the conference in the following lines.
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This is an important opportunity for Submitting Papers at the 16th IEEE International Conference on Compatibility, Power Electronics and Power Engineering 2022 (IEEE CPE-POWERENG 2022), which will be held in Birmingham June 29th to July 1st, 2022. CPE-POWERENG 2022 is sponsored by the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. In my role as Special Sessions Chair and given the recent surge in research and funding on the subject of low inertia grids, grids with high penetrations of inverter-interfaced resources and the efforts of the IEEE and other engineering institutions in establishing standards for such resources, we established 2 Special Sessions “Future-proof power electronic systems and control for residential microgrids” and “Advances in High Switching Frequency Power Converters for E-Mobility” (read more about them here). The conference website is now open at this link and the call for papers may be found here. We are expecting submissions on:
Power generation, transmission and distribution
Power electronics and applications
Smart grids technologies and applications
Renewable energies
Energy storage technologies
Distributed power generation systems communication, security and smart metering
Electrical machines and adjustable speed drives
Transport electrification
Electric mobility
Energy market
EMI and EMC issue
Many thanks to Dr. Pietro Tricoli at the University of Birmingham for honoring me with the role of the Special Sessions chair at this conference. Previous IEEE CPE-POWERENG events took place in 2021, 2020 and 2019.
