About this event

Oregon State University (OSU) Professor Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez will give the talk on grid resilience “Advanced Computing Techniques for Marine Energy Integration, Microgrid Control and Power Grid Resilience.”

Cotilla-Sanchez will discuss ongoing work at OSU that develops seamless integration of wave and current energy converters with traditional power system computational tools. He’ll discuss WEC-Grid, an open-source software framework that enables preliminary integration studies of renewable wave energy converters (WECs) with power grid steady state solvers (for example, power flow studies or quasi-steady-state simulations) and advanced AI tools. The framework enables flexibility in evaluating WEC performance under varying operational scenarios, both in stressful grid and sea states. It also provides researchers with the capability to analyze WEC impacts on grid stability, reliability and energy performance under various use cases, supporting diverse use cases such as fault analysis or steady state grid stability evaluation under high renewable penetration assessments.

The talk also covers OSU’s recent microgrid work that implements a lightweight computation of dynamic stability during controlled islanding. OSU researchers use the relationship between bus voltage deviation and the rate of change of voltage after a power network experiences a large disturbance that can lead to a cascading outage. The approach was tested with scenario-based simulations using the IEEE 39-bus system as a representative network from which a microgrid can be formed. The results were validated by comparing them with time-domain simulations of 1,000 possible scenarios. The result demonstrates an overall accuracy of 95.84% in the stability predictions.

Last, Cotilla-Sanchez will discuss other cascading failures-related works, related to machine learning and AI integration with grid models, as common research thrusts between OSU and the University of Nevada, Reno, and further opportunities for engagement and collaboration.

Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez is a professor and associate dean of academic affairs at OSU College of Engineering. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Vermont. His grid integration work spans from rural minigrid-distributed energy resources to transmission-level renewable generation. His technical contributions focus on power system modeling, resilience and security. Those interests spire into other research areas such as nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, microgrids, marine energy and wide-area power system data.

Additional information

• Attendance type: In person
• Cost: Free
• Event type: Lectures & Seminars