Awards and Grants
Below you will find different awards and grants our staff and students were given
Table of Contents
Advanced Operation of the Solar-Plus-Storage System in Distribution Systems: Improving Electric Grid Reliability, Efficiency, and Resilience
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a grant from California Energy Commission (CEC) to demonstrate the advanced operation of a residential, solar-plus-storage system. The system covers 15 different residential sites that reside in a minimum of three different climate zones across California.
The current power grid faces a future for which it was not designed. This includes dealing with a rapidly aging infrastructure that threatens grid resilience and reliability due to the additional burden placed on the grid by the adoption of high power-consumption loads, such as electric vehicles (EVs), and high variability in power supply due to the integration of renewable energy resources (RES). Although the intermittent nature of RES is a challenge for grid operation, paring RES (e.g. solar photovoltaics) with energy storage brings new opportunities to manage the grid. RES, energy storage, and power electronics are assets that can address future power system challenges by providing grid services, traditionally reserved for conventional generation resources such as peaking units. Proper coordination and operation of behind-the-meter (BTM) assets allow for demand side management and grid services. The net result is an improvement in electric grid reliability, efficiency, resilience, and sustainability
This project will develop and implement a test site and demonstration program for optimal operation of autonomous, plug-and-play, BTM solar-plus-battery units to perform demand side management (e.g. load shifting, peak shaving, and maximizing solar self-utilization) and grid services. Each unit, called PQ-CU, is based on solid-state-technology, supported by a small-scale solar cell and battery, as well as an advanced control mechanism, allowing dynamic operation of the unit in the distribution systems. This novel technology will be implemented and commissioned in low-income, disadvantaged, and Native American tribal communities located in High Fire-Threat District (HFTD) under California Electric Investor-Owned Utilities (IOU) service territories.
Sustainable Agriculture and Energy Systems for Rural Communities
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a Tier-1 Rural Renewal Initiative grant to incorporate advanced energy technologies with agriculture to make agriculture more sustainable as an activity, reduce the agricultural production cost, and improve farmers’ profit.
Decline in the financial soundness of small-scale-farming is one of the main issues that farmers in rural counties are facing, which has led to the loss of family farms. One effective solution to increase farmers’ income and their ability to stay in agriculture is to improve productivity of farms. Farm productivity highly depends on the cost of energy. To this end, the incorporation of advanced energy technologies with agriculture can play an important role in reducing energy costs, increasing the net farm income, and promoting more sustainable farming. This project aims to study the integration of local alternative energy resources (AER) with agriculture in rural areas. Alternative energy and farming have the potential to be a winning combination. It not only contributes to energy cost reduction, energy efficiency, and farming productivity, but also provides farmers with a long-term source of income. On the power grid side, deployment of local AER addresses the capacity shortage and reliability of electricity supply to rural areas. However, one of the challenges in the integration of RES into agriculture is that AER, such as Photovoltaics (PV) and wind, are weather dependent and intermittent. Also, electrical load, associated with water irrigation and other cropping activities, is changing as a nonlinear function of time, which adds extra uncertainty into the problem. Due to the temporal scale differences in plant and AER energy production, the cost-effective coupling of AER and rural agriculture faces an important issue called “multi-time scale coupling".
This project tackles multi-time scale coupling by developing rigorous models of agricultural load and AER generation to determine an optimized strategy for spatiotemporal based, multi-time scale, multi-model coupling. The project will develop probabilistic models for agricultural load and AER energy generation via a joint effort by researchers, energy service providers, and farmers. Then by incorporating stochastic characteristics of load and generation into a system design, the team seeks to mitigate risk of multi-time scale coupling that will lead to cost effective operation of an agriculture-AER system. The proposed research is expected to result in a systematic design strategy for coupling of AER with rural agriculture to achieve a sustainable agricultural system.
AI-Enabled Proactive Resilience Enhancement of Electric Infrastructure Against Wildfire
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a NSF EPSCOR grant to design and develop a proactive solution for enhancing grid resilience under wildfires in terms of active robustness and resourcefulness
In recent years, electric infrastructures have experienced significant damage and disruption due to large fires. The spread of wildfires into residential and/or commercial areas can also impact electricity distribution systems and substations. The Starbuck Fire burned half a million acres across Oklahoma and Kansas and caused at least $50 million in damages. The Thomas Fire led to widespread customer service disruptions and caused outages for more than 85,000 customers. According to the study performed by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the number and severity of future wildfires is expected to increase rapidly, exposing significant populations and infrastructure to wildfire losses and service disruptions.
I Although significant efforts have been made by utility companies to improve power grid resilience under wildfire, the focus has been mainly on passive resilience techniques such as undergrounding power lines, vegetation management, pole reinforcing and other system hardening methods. However, these passive methods, which are focused on replacement and hardening of electric infrastructure are extremely costly. For instance, the estimated cost to underground Oklahoma’s power lines is more than $58 billion. Fortunately, these costs can be minimized or delayed by incorporating smart control measures (i.e., active grid resilience) into the operational procedures of the system to effectively manage resources/assets, and survive a crisis as it happens. The focus of active grid resilience methods is to push the system to “bend” not to “break” against wildfire. They can be designed to minimize the immediate impact of wildfires, absorb and withstand the impacts, and quickly recover the system to its stable state.
This project aims to develop a decision-making tool to enhance the proactive resilience of electrical systems under wildfires considering real-time wildfire impact scenarios. During the course of a progressing wildfire, the proposed tool will help the power grid minimize the power interruption by proactively responding to wildfire contingencies via adaptation, load and resource management, and dynamic topology reconfiguration. The proactive grid response will be made based on identification of wildfire impacts caused by flame, heat, smoke, and ash on the electrical grid. Analytical modeling techniques will be utilized to generate and analyze possible impact scenarios of wildfire on the power grid leveraging artificial intelligence techniques. Then according to possible failure and contingency scenarios, a stochastic optimization will be developed and solved in real time to pursue network reconfiguration, and optimal operation of controllable assets in the grid under wildfire events.
Jason Aquino receives Oklahoma NSF EPSCoR Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Grant
Jason Aquino, a talented undergraduate student at Oklahoma State University, has received NSF EPSCoR grant to fund his research project thought the summer and help him gain research experience in his field.
Aquino is doing research on Electrical Power Resilience Against Ice-Storms. “What really motivated me to do this project was the November 2020 ice storms in Oklahoma,” Aquino said. “Many people I know were out of power for several days. I realized it was a huge problem for lots of people, and I want to help find a solution.”
Aquino wants to partake in research that benefits more people than just himself. “I am excited to partake in research that has the potential to benefit people,” Aquino said. “I think that seeing a problem and finding a solution benefits me and others around me so much more than just having a part-time job.” Aquino’s end goal is to propose an ice storm, self-healing solution for power systems.
ECE student Thomas Kidd receives IEEE PES Scholarship
The IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) selects Thomas Kidd as a 2021 IEEE PES Scholarship Plus Initiative recipient.
The IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) recently announced recipients for its prestigious PES Scholarship Plus Initiative. In a nationally competitive landscape, ECE student Thomas Kidd was selected.
Thomas Kidd is highly active in ECE by serving this year as the president of the student branch of IEEE at OSU. Kidd is working with Dr. Nazaripouya, ECE assistant professor, to develop a website for the Power Grid Modernization Lab (https://sites.google.com/view/osupgml/home) and to update the dashboard for the renewable energy student project located in the ENDEAVOR. “I am so grateful to be the recipient of the IEEE PES Scholarship Plus Initiative,” said Kidd. “I am excited for future opportunities to learn and impact the energy industry of the future.”