SmartGrid

As prices for solar photovoltaics and battery energy storage plummet, grids around the globe are undergoing tremendous changes. How should we design and operate grids in the future in the presence of these technologies? This talk will cover some of my group's recent efforts to answer this question, focusing on a new approach to decentralized network optimization – a variant of the primal-dual subgradient method — that can be used to enable grid-integration of distributed energy resources such as solar photovoltaics, batteries and electric vehicles. I will then discuss how grids should be built in the future when distributed energy resource costs are so low. Using a simple concept called an iso-reliability curve, I will explain a method to identify cost-optimal fully decentralized systems – i.e. standalone solar home systems. After applying this method to a large solar resource dataset, I will present results indicating that in many unelectrified parts of the world, future decentralized systems will be able to deliver electricity at costs and reliabilities better than existing centralized grids.

The seminars are scheduled for 1:30 pm on the dates listed above. The speakers are renowned scholars or industry experts in power and energy systems. We believe they will bring novel insights and fruitful discussions to Stanford. This seminar is offered as a 1 unit seminar course, CEE 272T/EE292T. Interested students can take this seminar course for credit by completing a project based on the topics presented in this course.

Yours sincerely,
Smart Grid Seminar Organization Team,

Ram Rajagopal, Associate Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Electrical Engineering
Sila Kiliccote, Managing Director of Grid Innovations, Bits & Watts 
Chin-Woo Tan, Director, Stanford Smart Grid Lab 
Yuting Ji, Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Since 2015, Tesla has installed a total of over one gigawatt-hour of energy storage that is critical for using renewable energy at scale. Over 20,000 customers across 40 countries are using Tesla stationary storage products for a variety of sustainable energy applications: powering filtration systems for clean water in Puerto Rico, stabilizing the grid in Australia, cooling classrooms in Hawaii, and powering entire islands in the South Pacific, etc. This talk will introduce the general efforts of Tesla's Energy Optimization Team, which develops the "brain" of its energy storage products. Optimization and machine learning techniques are utilized on all different products. A few recent projects will also be presented.

The seminars are scheduled for 1:30 pm on the dates listed above. The speakers are renowned scholars or industry experts in power and energy systems. We believe they will bring novel insights and fruitful discussions to Stanford. This seminar is offered as a 1 unit seminar course, CEE 272T/EE292T. Interested students can take this seminar course for credit by completing a project based on the topics presented in this course.

Yours sincerely,
Smart Grid Seminar Organization Team,

Ram Rajagopal, Associate Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Electrical Engineering
Sila Kiliccote, Managing Director of Grid Innovations, Bits & Watts 
Chin-Woo Tan, Director, Stanford Smart Grid Lab 
Yuting Ji, Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Power electronic converters impact all aspects of power systems – generation (renewable), transmission, distribution and end use. Power electronics is the key technology that enables reliable and secure integration of very large-scale renewable resources to the grid, new architectures including micro-grids, distributed grid control, and the rapid shift to electric transportation. This talk will highlight power electronics and controls in advanced PV inverters, wind energy systems, solid-state transformers and EV infrastructure. Key concepts that explain how the advanced functionalities are realized will be described. Recent advances in high voltage power electronics with wide bandgap devices, new topologies, and emerging trends and research challenges will be presented.

The seminars are scheduled for 1:30 pm on the dates listed above. The speakers are renowned scholars or industry experts in power and energy systems. We believe they will bring novel insights and fruitful discussions to Stanford. This seminar is offered as a 1 unit seminar course, CEE 272T/EE292T. Interested students can take this seminar course for credit by completing a project based on the topics presented in this course.

Yours sincerely,
Smart Grid Seminar Organization Team,

Ram Rajagopal, Associate Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Electrical Engineering
Sila Kiliccote, Managing Director of Grid Innovations, Bits & Watts
Chin-Woo Tan, Director, Stanford Smart Grid Lab
Yuting Ji, Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil and Environmental Engineering

California has the will, ambition, technology and legal requirement to decarbonize our energy sector by 2045. In the dozen years since passage of AB32, we have made great progress but we may be making some grave mistakes. In this discussion, Dr. Fine describes how distributed energy resources are presenting new opportunities in distribution resources, transmission and procurement planning, and market reforms that will determine if our clean energy future is one that is affordable for all.

This talk provides an overview of Siemens Corporate Technology's recent research on new control functions for future power systems. Three different topics are discussed: (a) adaptive power oscillation damping optimization to increase the stability reserve of power systems, (b) robust power flow optimization to increase power system resilience to volatile generation, and (c) new research challenges for autonomous microgrids that provide autonomous operation and plug-and-produce capabilities.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) originated and continues to maintain one of the two leading open-source distribution system simulators, called GridLAB-D, which has been downloaded 80,000+ times world-wide. While it continues to improve core functionality, PNNL is placing more emphasis recently on GridLAB-D as part of a development platform, improving its interoperability and opening the software up to more customization by researchers. This talk will cover two ongoing open-source development projects, funded by the U. S. Department of Energy, that incorporate and extend GridLAB-D. One of these projects is also expected to contribute distribution feeder model conversion tools for a new California Energy Commission project headed by SLAC. Highlights of the talk will include:

• Transactive energy simulation platform, at tesp.readthedocs.io/en/latest
• GridAPPS-D application development platform, at gridappsd.readthedocs.io/en/latest
• Evole GridLAB-D's co-simulation support from FNCS interface, to a multi-lab interface called HELICS compliant with Functional Mockup Interface (FMI): https://github.com/GMLC-TDC/HELICS-src
• Leveraging new capabilities for large-building simulation in JModelica, power flow analysis in OpenDSS, and transactive energy system agents in Python
• Implementation and use of the Common Information Model (CIM) in a NoSQL triple-store database for standardized feeder model conversion
• Comparison of different types of stochastic modeling for load and distributed energy resource (DER) output variability, and its impact on feeder model order reduction and state estimation
• Special system protection example concerns on urban secondary networks with high penetration of DER

Scenario generation is an important step in the operation and planning of power systems. In this talk, we present a data-driven approach for scenario generation using the popular generative adversarial networks, where to deep neural networks are used in tandem. Compared with existing methods that are often hard to scale or sample from, our method is easy to train, robust, and captures both spatial and temporal patterns in renewable generation. In addition, we show that different conditional information can be embedded in the framework. Because of the feedforward nature of the neural networks, scenarios can be generated extremely efficiently.

System resiliency is the number 1 concern for electrical utilities in 2018 according to the CEO of the PJM, the nation's largest independent system operator. This talk will offer insights and practical answers through examples, of how power grids can be affected by weather and how countermeasures, such microgrids, can be applied to mitigate them. It will focus on two major events; Super Storm Sandy and Hurricane Maria, and the role of renewable energy resources and microgrids in these two natural disasters. It will discuss the role of microgrids in blackstarting the power grid after a blackout.

Transmission-distribution coordinated energy management (TDCEM) is recognized as a promising solution to the challenge of high DER penetration, but lack of a distributed computation method that universally and effectively works for TDCEM. To bridge this gap, a generalized master-slave-splitting (G-MSS) method is proposed based on a general-purpose transmission-distribution coordination model (G-TDCM), enabling G-MSS to be applicable to most central functions of TDCEM. In G-MSS, a basic heterogeneous decomposition (HGD) algorithm is first derived from the heterogeneous decomposition of the coupling constraints in the KKT system regarding G-TDCM. Optimality and convergence properties of this algorithm are proved. Furthermore, a modified HGD algorithm is developed by utilizing subsystem's response function, resulting in faster convergence. The distributed G-MSS method is then demonstrated to successfully solve central functions of TDCEM including power flow, contingency analysis, voltage stability assessment, economic dispatch and optimal power flow. Severe issues of over-voltage and erroneous assessment of the system security that are caused by DERs are thus resolved by G-MSS with modest computation cost. A real-world demonstration project in China will be presented.

The speakers are renowned scholars or industry experts in power and energy systems. We believe they will bring novel insights and fruitful discussions to Stanford. This seminar is offered as a 1 unit seminar course, CEE 272T/EE292T. Interested students can take this seminar course for credit by completing a project based on the topics presented in this course.