Transcript – Analytics for Renewable Energy Management in Microgrids

Our team of researchers from three departments, namely industrial and systems engineering, statistics, and electrical and computer engineering, got together to create a cross disciplinary research program to effectively manage micro grids, our local electricity grids that can potentially generate energy from within the boundaries, such as a campus using renewable sources such as wind through wind turbines and solar through photovoltaic cells, as well as non-renewable sources like diesel generators, among others. These micro grids can operate with little or no energy from the traditional grid. Micro grids are extremely useful, especially under situations like natural disasters such as hurricanes that result in power outages or even for communities that are far away from the main grid. However, besides enhancing resilience and recovery, microgrants can also be used to lower costs, strengthen reliability of the central grid and promote clean energy. While the benefits of microcredit is that locally sourced energy suffer less transmission losses. The challenges are in terms of the uncertainty and variability of the sources that need careful planning and control to address the challenges as a first step, we collaboratively build effective models for forecasting renewable energy generation over time and space, as well as we build a testbed for integration and control. As a team, we were able to effectively set up the engineering to collect data from the testbed, build predictive models and develop policies for operations. Our results are extremely promising in that the collaboration has resulted in innovative technology to solve a local problem that has potential for significant global impact. We are extremely grateful to the President’s Excellence Fund for supporting our work. Thank you.