research

Resilient Energy Systems: The electric power grid is inundated with new challenges due to rapid decarbonization goals and extreme weather events. Our group’s research on this theme is focused on climate change adaptation solutions for the power grid using controllable grid-edge resources. This research is crucial to solving emerging challenges to the grid due to rare contingencies like extreme hot/cold weather events (e.g., those recently observed in Texas and the Pacific Northwest), wildfires, and windstorms. The proposed research has provided a new framework to quantitatively evaluate the tradeoffs of multiple utility planning approaches and operational procedures on the outage risks faced by the community. Additionally, the proposed solutions to reduce outage risks have been implemented using an open-source platform to provide a proof-of-concept and are currently being prototyped for field demonstration in collaboration with industry and community stakeholders.

DER/Grid-Edge Coordination: A conscious move towards a sustainable energy future with transportation electrification and building automation is continuing to push for more intelligence at the grid edge, necessitating new methods to reliably integrate millions of grid-edge devices. Our goal in this research theme is to develop computationally tractable and accurate grid-edge optimization algorithms. Our key contributions include (1) accurate and scalable centralized three-phase unbalanced optimal power flow algorithms, (2) scalable distributed algorithms for computational tractability, and (3) online optimization and use of reinforcement learning to manage fast-varying scenarios. Our unifying theme is to systematically leverage the physics of the electric power flow to develop domain-specific provably convergent approximation, relaxation, and decomposition techniques with superior performance compared to generic optimization algorithms. We are also working on an algorithmic framework for grid-edge coordination under limited data, computing, and communication.