SmartGrid

Buildings account for the largest share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at 32% of the total, followed by industry at 30%, transportation at 29%, and agriculture at 9%. Clearly, any program to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions must include buildings. This talk will explore the opportunities and challenges to greatly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector, using as a case study a recent solar retrofit of an existing house that rendered it "zero-carbon." Implications for the future of the utility system will be discussed.

Thin-film solar cells, which use light-weight, highly-absorbing semiconductors, have the potential to dramatically lower manufacturing costs and accelerate deployment of solar energy via mechanically flexible architectures. Hybrid metal halide perovskites are the leading materials for this next-generation solar technology by virtue of their unprecedented optoelectronic properties and their synthesis from earth-abundant elements. The groundbreaking promise of perovskites is that they can be manufactured by scalable solution-coating methods, making them a potentially low-cost and high-performance energy technology with projected levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) below 3¢ / kWh.

This talk will discuss the current understanding of the optoelectronic properties of perovskites as well as how these properties inform the design of single-junction and tandem perovskite-silicon cell architectures. We will consider routes to upscaling perovskite module fabrication and look at challenges related to the fundamental thermomechanical reliability of these material systems.

Competing standards often proliferate in early stages of product markets and may lead to socially inefficient investment. This paper studies the effect of unifying three incompatible standards for charging electric vehicles in the U.S. from 2011 to 2015. I develop and estimate a structural model of vehicle demand and charging network investment to quantify the impact of a uniform charging standard. Variation in federal and state subsidies identify the demand elasticities. Counterfactual simulations show moving to a uniform charging standard increases consumer surplus by $500 million; car manufacturers build 2.8% fewer charging locations and sell 20.8% more electric vehicles.

Power systems are facing grand challenges from increasing dynamics and stochastics from both the generation and the demand sides. This has caused great difficulty in designing and implementing optimal control for the grid in real time. Tremendous efforts have been spent in the past on computational methods and advanced modeling techniques that provide faster and better situational awareness, based on measurements from advanced grid sensors, PMU as an example. However, as grid operators are heavily involved in the decision-making process, the entire procedure has not been made fully automated, limiting the potential of such applications. That is, not only does the 'grid' need to perceive faster, it also needs to think and act faster. Towards this end, sub-second autonomous control schemes need to be developed. Over the past years, the PMU & System Analytics Group at GEIRI North America has built up an autonomous grid dispatch and control platform using deep reinforcement learning, the Grid Mind. Combined with Grid Eye, the grid monitoring and situational awareness platform, Grid Mind has demonstrated promise in helping address the pressing issues modern power systems faces. This talk will summarize this developmental effort while focusing on the key technologies utilized for the Grid Mind framework.

Recently, the academic and industrial literature has arrived at a consensus in which the electric power grid evolves to a more intelligent, responsive, and dynamic system that propels the sustainable energy transition. This evolution is caused by several drivers including decarbonization, growing electricity demand, deregulation of electricity markets, active end-user participation, and digital innovations in energy technologies. On the supply side, the introduction of variable energy resources (VERs), like solar and wind, necessitates fundamental changes in the power grid's dynamic operation. VER forecasts are uncertain and their profiles are intermittent thus requiring greater quantities of operating reserves. In such a case, fast-ramping natural gas and hydro-electric power plants take on a prominent grid balancing role. At higher levels of solar PV and wind generation, dispatchable demand-side resources become the only remaining option for grid balancing. These devices are not just energy artifacts, but also exist within other engineering systems. Consequently, their integration gives rise to new multi-disciplinary challenges such as electrified transportation and the energy-water nexus. This presentation seeks to shed light on the increasingly intertwined futures of energy, water, and transportation resources. It draws upon three full-scale case studies: The ISO New England System Operational Analysis and Renewable Energy Integration Study, New England Energy-Water Nexus Study, and Abu Dhabi Electric Vehicle Integration Study. Together, these studies show that while all three types of resources have the potential to disrupt the other, they can also be harmonized to create sustainable synergies across all three engineering systems

Individuals of all genders invited to be a part of:
#StanfordToo: A Conversation about Sexual Harassment in Our Academic Spaces, where we will feature real stories of harassment at Stanford academic STEM in a conversation with Provost Drell, Dean Minor (SoM), and Dean Graham (SE3). We will have plenty of time for audience discussion on how we can take concrete action to dismantle this culture and actively work towards a more inclusive Stanford for everyone. While our emphasis is on STEM fields, we welcome and encourage participation from students, postdocs, staff, and faculty of all academic disciplines and backgrounds.

The deployment of smart meters throughout California a decade ago resulted in a host of startups with ideas to leverage the new wealth of data to reduce energy consumption and customer bills. But few if any profitable businesses emerged. More recently, new state legislation and regulatory changes support a "pay for performance" approach to energy efficiency that holds great promise for innovative data analytics. This talk will focus on the opportunity, HEA's participation, and the remaining barriers. needs, without needing reformulations of existing scheduling approaches, and therefore to be able to use them in actual system operation.

In this presentation, I would like to discuss with you how to establish a sustainable and smart society through the internet of energy for connecting at any time and any place. I suspect that you have heard the phrase, "Internet of Energy" less often. The meaning of this phrase is simple. Because of a ubiquitous energy transmission system, you do not need to worry about a shortage of electric power. One of the most important items for establishing a sustainable society is [...]

"Inaugural Linvill Distinguished Seminar on Electronic Systems Technology," EE News, July 2018

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