In a power system, operators maintain voltage stability through adequate reactive reserves. Maintaining and accessing an efficient allocation of reactive reserves is prohibitively complex because of reactive line losses, the variety of reactive resources, and either limited or variable reactive outputs from renewable sources. By clustering the system into smaller...
The electrical output of solar panels is reduced when dust covers the panels, but the air movement produced by a flying drone can be used to remove this debris. This research project will study the effectiveness of a quadcopter drone in dusting a solar panel. A solar panel was covered...
The Pacific Northwest is part of the "Ring of Fire," which is well-known for heavy seismic activity. Numerous active faults in the area have encouraged electric grid managers in the region to more deeply contemplate and proactively intervene to support grid resilience. This research introduces Monte Carlo (MC) based power...
As the sources of our electricity shift from centralized and carbon emitting, to a portfolio of distributed, clean-energy sources, the wave energy converter (WEC) has become a topic of exploration and development for providing coastal communities electric power. Part of this trend has included an effort to create open source...
Data acquisition (DAQ) systems are a necessary component for products whose outcomes depend on collected information throughout its operation. Current systems are directed towards users utilizing custom hardware, software, and requiring its user to have high-level skills in coding and system setup; but with the increasing interest in renewable energy,...
Ocean waves provide a promising source of renewable energy for the North American electric grid. However, ideal control of wave energy converters (WECs) requires perfect forecasting of future wave conditions, and waves can be unpredictable. This paper presents a comparison of three different prediction methods and analyzes their performance in...
This design of a Grid Friendly Electric Hot Water Heater Thermostat was built for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Design course, ECE44x. The design enables hot water heaters to respond to imbalances in the grid seen through deviations from standard grid frequency by varying the power output to the...
Electricity is at the center of attention as today many essential systems (water, gas, communications, and the internet for example) and infrastructures depend on its continuity for their smooth functioning. On the other hand, electricity power networks have developed and became large, and highly complex technical systems, geographically extended, requiring...
Model Predictive Control (MPC) has previously been investigated on ocean waveenergy converters (WEC) to improve the amount of power captured, while respectingthe system constraints. Previous research done in the same area, focused onbuilding a control scheme by using the knowledge of the past & current statesof the system and predicting...
Hydropower is the one of the oldest renewable energy technologies and is wrongly thought of today as having little room to grow. The opportunity for new hydropower capacity is immense through both technology advancement and run-of-river new stream reach projects. Despite the age of hydropower, a divide in opinion is...
Load modeling that can accurately represent the dynamic behavior of generators and loads is important in the operation and planning of transmission and distribution systems. Yet, it is a complex subject in power system research communities and electric utilities. The composition of the end-use loads is changing continually based on...
Wave energy converters (WECs) are a broad class of emerging technology that converts hydrokinetic energy into some other useful form, such as electricity. The last stage in this transformation, the power take-off (PTO) subsystem, is often not experimentally evaluated until half-way through the recommended development process. This delay in evaluation...
When the term renewable energy is mentioned in a conversation, wind, solar, and hydro energy typically come to mind. However, there is one major resource that has remained mostly untapped: wave energy. Wind and solar power technologies are well established around the world but they cannot generate electricity all the...
Recently, there has been peaked interest in developing high energy producing and optimized power take-off topologies for Wave Energy Converters (WEC). As large as the potential of the oceans may seem, harnessing that energy and effectively converting it to electricity in significant amounts is a challenge. Currently, there are no...
The National Conference of State Legislatures NCSL declares that 29 states have
been active in adopting and increasing renewable portfolio standards. Present
renewable portfolio standards require utilities to increase integration of renewable
energy sources such as photovoltaic (PV). The increased penetration of PV systems
is expected to destabilize the power...
Recent opportunities for new hydropower generation in the United States have often been in non-powered dams and run-of-river type flows occurring in low-impact natural areas and unregulated conduits. At the same time, a changing water resource paradigm is challenging some existing generation in drought stricken areas where supply reservoirs behind...
Synchrophasor technology has gained great momentum with the widely adopted concept of smart grids in power systems at transmission and generation level. This has led to an improved state estimation of a power system with the advent of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU). PMUs contribute in providing real-time information about the...
The objective of the work presented herein is the development of the extended Kalman filter for nonlinear system modeling. A standard Kalman filter is a well-known filter for estimating the state of a system, assuming the system is linear and it has a Gaussian distribution in its noise. In reality,...
Permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs) are widely used in electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles to propel the wheels. Various control strategies have been developed for PMSM drive systems to achieve both high efficiency and safe operation. In a PMSM drive system, generally the high voltage battery and the power...
Recent blackout events consistently show that a variety of mechanisms are involved in cascading outages. These cascading mechanisms are irregularly modeled and validated within the existing literature and industry practices. Understanding the relative significance of these different mechanisms is important for choosing which one(s) needs to be modeled for specific...