Overview
My recent research has been focused on the fundamental theories and analytics of stability analysis, control design, and strategic decision-making in power systems concerning the integration of large-scale renewables. As a worldwide trend, our power system is undergoing a historical transition from the traditional to a new landscape with high penetration of renewable energies and power electronics. For example, the wind and PV generation's installed capacity is estimated to be 100GW per year in China. However, the ever-increasing integration of large-scale renewable generation has been creating significant challenges to energy/power balance and system stability, mainly due to:
volatile renewable generation brings about high uncertainty in system planning and operation;
massive heterogeneous dynamic devices may threaten system stability, while controllable resources are fragmented and challenging to control.
In this regard, a question naturally arises: can existing theories and analytics developed for traditional power systems be sufficient for the future? Unfortunately, the answer is probably not positive. Motivated by this, my research aims to build novel fundamental theories and tools to help meet the challenges and resolve the power system's balance and stability issues in the transition. During the past 10 years, I have continuously conducted research mainly regarding the following two aspects.
Regarding system stability: to develop distributed stability analytics and distributed optimal control design approaches to meet the challenges arising from massive heterogeneous dynamics. This leads to my first research area: distributed control and optimization.
Regarding system balance: to develop game-theoretic methodologies to cope with uncertainties due to high-penetration renewable generation and interplays due to strategic behaviors of multiple decision-makers. This leads to my second research area: strategic decision-making.
I also worked on cascading failure analysis and industrial controller development, etc. Please see other research topics.