Author: Prof. Junbo Zhao chairs a working group to win prestigious IEEE PES Working Group Recognition Award

Prof. Junbo Zhao, who served as the chair of the IEEE Task Force on Power System Dynamic State and Parameter Estimation, along with his fellow working group members earned the prestigious IEEE PES Outstanding Working Group for Outstanding Technical Report Award, one of the highest awards from IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES).

This award recognizes the most outstanding working groups from among those nominated by each Technical Committee. Only two working groups are chosen each year to win this award, one for Technical Report and one for Standard or Guide. The committee’s report is titled “Power System Dynamic State and Parameter Estimation-Transition to Power Electronics-Dominated Clean Energy Systems.” This report aims to 1) clearly review its motivations and definitions, demonstrate its values for enhanced power system modeling, monitoring, operation, control, and protection as well as power engineering education; 2) provide recommendations to vendors, national labs, utilities, and ISOs on the use of dynamic state estimator for enhancement of the reliability, security, and resiliency of electric power systems. More information on the report and authors can be found here.

The IEEE PES provides the world’s largest forum for sharing the latest in technological developments in the electric power industry, for developing standards that guide the development and construction of equipment and systems, and for educating members of the industry and the general public. IEEE PES is the second-largest society under IEEE and has nearly 43,000 members across the world.

Author: Joint appointments as Research Scientists at National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Professor Emmanouil Anagnostou and Professor Junbo Zhao have started their new positions as the Research Scientist at National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) under the UConn-NREL partnership. They will be affiliated with the Grid Automation and Controls Group at NREL.

Among the many goals of the partnership, UConn and NREL will work together to invest in the development of joint solutions to clean energy challenges in the Northeast and increase funding opportunities not otherwise available to either individual institution. The program enables pathways for undergraduate and graduate students to work jointly with NREL scientists and UConn faculty.

“Partnering with NREL opens UConn to unlimited possibilities and advancements in clean energy research and innovation,” says Dr. Pamir Alpay, UConn’s interim vice president for research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. “We have worked hard to build our reputation as a leader in the field, creating opportunities for students and our faculty to contribute global solutions to meet energy needs and reduce dependency on carbon. NREL brings resources and collaborations that expand our reach, to the benefit of the energy and workforce infrastructure of UConn and the state.”

Author: Professor Zhao won a $4.4M DOE Renewables Advancing Community Energy Resilience (RACER) project

Professor Junbo Zhao and his team won a $4.4M DOE Renewables Advancing Community Energy Resilience (RACER) project:

Project Name: Proactive: Predictive Community Outage Preparedness and Active Last Mile Visibility Feedback Autonomous Restoration
Location: Storrs, CT
DOE Award Amount: $3 million
Awardee Cost Share: $1.4 million
Principal Investigator: Junbo Zhao
Project Description: With the collaborative effort among state government, utility companies, communities, industry, and universities, this project proposes to develop and demonstrate a predictive community outage preparedness and active last mile visibility feedback autonomous restoration solution, termed PROACTIVE, to achieve community resiliency with PVs and other distributed energy resources (DERs). PROACTIVE will transform traditional manual and time-consuming grid restoration into two-layer outage prediction preparedness and real-time robust grid visibility informed optimal and autonomous and fast restoration processes. The team will closely work with community stakeholders throughout the project to design and demonstrate the PROACTIVE technologies at Hartford and West Hartford communities in Connecticut serviced by Eversource Energy distribution feeders.

Project Team:

• National Renewable Energy Lab
• CableLabs
• Utilidata, Inc.
• City of Hartford
• West Hartford, Connecticut
• Eversource Energy

Stakeholders and Industry Advisors:

• Connecticut Green Bank
• IBM
• Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority
• ETAP 
• NEC Laboratories America, Inc.
• AVANGRID 
• Travelers
• Electric Power Research Institute-EPRI

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) Renewables Advancing Community Energy Resilience (RACER) is a $33 million funding program supporting projects that enable communities to use solar and solar-plus-storage to prevent disruptions in power caused by extreme weather and other events, and to rapidly restore electricity if it goes down. More information about the selected projects can be found here.

Author: New Project for Microgrid Resiliency under DoD ESTCP

Junbo Zhao, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the grid modernization team lead at Eversource Energy Center, has received a grant for his work in advanced microgrid optimization and control.

This is a collaborative proposal with National Renewable Energy Lab entitled “Physics-Informed Intelligent and Proactive Building Load Management for Energy Resilience” in response to DoD ESTCP’s FY2022 FOA. This project proposes to encode load flexibility harnessing technologies with novel physics-informed multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) proactive control algorithms for advanced load management. The load flexibility harnessing allows improving energy efficiency under normal operation as well as providing helpful load information for emergent energy control during grid outages. MADRL enables us to embed the dynamic impacts of load shedding into the online optimal control of energy resources and loads during grid outages. More information about the ESTCP and the selected projects can be found here.

Zhao’s research interests include cyber-physical power system modeling, monitoring, uncertainty quantification, learning, dynamics, stability control, and cyber security with distributed energy resources. More information about him and his research can be found here.