Research Projects

Project Advisors:


** the research projects are particularly designed for undergraduate students at all levels and training/resources will be provided by the REU program to get you up to speed. 

** students in engineering, math, physics, computer science, etc. are all welcome to apply.


Project #1 Power System Optimization Problems in a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Environment (Mr. Matt Musto, Prof. Daqing Hou, Prof. Leo Jiang)

Due to ever-increasing demands for flexibility and new features in the bulk power system brought on by the rapid build of renewable generation and energy storage assets, the performance of long-term planning models and short-term wholesale power market optimization suffers with the increased size and complexity of the optimization problems. The complex problem formulations used in power system planning and operation can often be replaced with simpler yet practical solutions that avoid these computational limitations.

The student will use simplified unit commitment and economic dispatch power system modeling and the Clarkson HPC environment to explore methods to parallelize this common application to improve its performance. Additional analysis tools can be used as needed for the project. Guidance on using the model code, the underlying concepts in Power Engineering, and the HPC environment will be provided. The modeling tools are open source and students are encouraged to modify or add to them as needed for the project.

*this will be a collaborative project with Clarkson's HPC summer research. We plan to have at least two students (one from the power engineering side and one from the HPC side collaborate and work together for this research).

 

Project #2 Operational Energy Adequacy for the New York Power Grid with High Renewables (Dr. Sushant Varghese, Prof. Leo Jiang)

New York set up an ambitious climate goal and it is mandated to have 6,000 MW solar, 6,000 MW Energy Storage by 2030, 9,000 MW offshore wind by 2035, and 100% decarbonization of the electricity system by 2040. These installed variable renewable electricity sources expose the New York power grid to unprecedented uncertainties and variability, particularly under extreme events. To ensure a reliable grid operation, system operators need to procure system generation capacity to serve the expected load demand and accommodate the renewable uncertainties.

This research project will evaluate the operational energy adequacy of the New York power grid with high penetrations of renewable energies. Student activities include: 1) run the probabilistic load forecasting tools at Clarkson; 2) collect and characterize the renewable forecasting uncertainties; and 3) carry out Monte-Carlo simulation to assess the loss of load risk under forecasting uncertainties of renewables and load demand.

 

Project#3 Characterize the Variability of the Expected 9GW Offshore Wind Farms and Its Impact on Ancillary Service Requirement in the New York Power Grid (Miss. Kanchan Upadhyay, Prof. Brian Helenbrook, Prof. Leo Jiang)

Offshore wind energy is poised to become a major source of affordable, renewable power for New York. The State is well on the way to developing 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035, enough to power up to 6 million homes. The expected 9,000 MW offshore wind farms will be located in the New York/New Jersey bight in the federal leased areas. Due to the geographically close locations, the 9,000 MW offshore wind farms may have spatially and temporally correlated variability, which will have a profound impact on the reliable and economic operation of the New York power grid. Particularly, flexible generation resources need to be procured to accommodate the ramping need due to the large variability of offshore wind generation.

The student will 1) develop the offshore wind generation profiles for the expected offshore wind leased areas with historical meteorology data provided by the advisors; 2) statistically characterize the variability of the expected 9GW offshore wind, including ramping and spatio-temporal correlation among different offshore wind farms; and 3) explore the impact of the variability on the long-term generation capacity expansion and market operations of the New York Power Grid based on the testbed available at Clarkson.

 

Project #4 Flexible Interconnection of Solar Farms into Electric Power Distribution Systems (Mr. Joe Skutt, Prof. Leo Jiang)

Solar energy technologies are essential to achieving a 100% clean electricity system by 2035 and a net-zero energy system by 2050. According to the Solar Futures Study by the Department of Energy, solar power will need to grow from 5% of the U.S. electricity supply today to 40% by 2035 and 45% by 2050. This will require solar deployment to increase roughly 20% per year for the rest of the decade. With the proliferation of solar energies, distribution systems are stressed with increasing grid interconnection requests of solar farms. AvanGrid has piloted cutting-edge technologies, i.e., flexible interconnection, to streamline the solar interconnection process with the preliminary results showing an increased solar hosting capacity from 2.6MW to 15MW for a particular distribution system feeder circuit.

The student will 1) run load flow in CYME/OpenDSS with utility distribution systems from NYSEG/AvanGrid; 2) run time series simulation to evaluate the potential solar curtailment for solar farms in the interconnection queue due to thermal limits and/or violation issues; and 3) analyze the cost-benefit of solar curtailment versus distribution grid upgrade for solar farm grid integration.

 

Project #5 Design and Dispatch a Resilient Microgrid to Serve the Rural Alaska Community (Dr. Ibrahima Ndiaye, Prof. Ken Visser, Prof. Leo Jiang)

This project will design a resilient microgrid to serve a rural Alaska community for a resilient energy supply. The design will consider the hybrid energy resources including the Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems, solar farms, energy storage, and distributed wind turbines. Subsequentially, an integrated heat and electricity resource dispatch strategy for the microgrid with hybrid distributed resources will be developed to serve the rural community in Alaska. One potential configuration of the microgrid dispatch will be comprised of a biomass-fueled 120kWe CHP system, 250kW PV, and 197kWh BESS rack, providing heat and electricity to the 80,000 sq-ft school building, the hockey rink, and the 3,100 sq-ft on campus greenhouse.

Task 1 will be using HOMER or other similar tools to design the optimized configuration of the microgrid with hybrid distributed resources to serve the rural Alaska community; Task 2 is to apply the forecasting technologies that have been developed at Clarkson for electricity and heat demand estimation; Task 3 will be modeling the operational characteristic of the biomass-fueled CHP system and energy storage; and Task 4 will develop the economic dispatch technology for the integrated heat and electricity system to minimize the operational cost of the micro-grid in Alaska.

 

Project #6 Hardware in the Loop Testing of Transmission System Fault Sensing Relays with High Penetration Levels of Wind Farms (Prof. Tom Ortmeyer)

This project will involve the hardware in the loop (HIL) testing of transmission system protective relays on a system that includes large wind farms. These wind farms create significant problems in the sensing of transmission system fault types and locations, and there is a need for advanced protection methods in order to maintain the reliability of the power grid. Task 1 of the project will be to upgrade the existing Real Time Digital Simulation (RTDS) based power grid model to include a large farm with Type IV wind turbines. Task 2 of the project will be to interface the RTDS system with the protective relays (SEL/GE/Siemens relays donated by National Grid).  Task 3 of the project tests the capability of the protective relays, and recommends relay types and settings that will provide secure and dependable fault sensing. 

 

Project #7 Hardware-in-the Loop (HIL) Controller Validation of Grid-Integrated Solar Farms (Prof. Jianhua Zhang, Prof. Tom Ortmeyer)

With the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (including photovoltaic generation, battery storage systems, and EV charging stations), distribution network operation and control is faced with several challenges; these challenges include protection strategies for bidirectional power flow, DER control methods, and unbalanced faults. To address these challenges, industry vendors have developed new protection relay and controller products. In this project, these new products can be effectively validated through the proposed 3-phase inverter-based HIL testbed.

Firstly, the HIL testbed will be developed with the following main steps: 1) The simulated power distribution system will be developed in the Real Time Digital Simulation (RTDS); 2) The simulated PV irradiations in the PV simulator will be fed to the physical 3-phase PV inverter; and 3) the 3-phase PV inverter will be integrated into the RTDS distribution system through the Chroma grid simulator. Secondly, unbalanced faults will be simulated in the developed HIL testbed. Finally, the performance of the PV controller and distribution system protective relays will be validated in the developed HIL testbed.

 

Project #8 Resilient Power Grid Network Design against Perturbations Induced Power Outages (Prof. Jeremie Fish)

The stability of the power grid directly affects people’s everyday lives. Occasionally, due to various perturbations with both natural and unnatural causes, the power grid experiences cascading failures, which can leave large amounts of people without power. As the power grid is a complex system, sometimes seemingly innate alterations can have catastrophic effects, a famous example being a cascading failure in the German electrical grid, which was caused by removal of a single line during routine maintenance. Thus it is of great interest to design power grid networks in a manner that makes them as resilient as possible to such perturbations, while also accounting for both geographical and cost constraints.

Student Research Activity: (1) A popular network dynamics model, derived from the swing equation, will be implemented for the purposes of simulation. (2) A variety of networks will be examined, both those found in the literature which represent the “real world” as well as other “random network” models which will be used in the simulation model developed in (1). (3) For the full network dynamics models developed in (1) and (2), the stability of the system (in this case Basin Stability) will be analyzed under a variety of scenarios to determine which networks are the most resilient against perturbations.