Wide Area Control Architectures for the Future Power System

Abstract

In order to integrate significant levels of renewables into the power system without sacrificing reliability, the power grid requires coordination on a broad geographic scale. New technology developments allowing for syn-chronized monitoring, more flexible transmission use and greater controllability of loads shows promise for achieving such coordinated operation. Moreover, communication advances allow information to be available reliably and quickly throughout the system.

This talk will overview our on-going work on wide area control in the CURENT Center and highlight some recent results in measurement based distributed control approaches.

Biography

Kevin Tomsovic is currently CTI Professor in the Dept. of EECS at University of Tennessee, and director of CURENT，a National Science Foundation and Department of Energy Engineering Research Center. He received the BS from Michigan Tech. University, Houghton, in 1982, and the MS and Ph.D. degrees from University of Washington, Seattle, in 1984 and 1987, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. From 1992-2008, he was a Professor at Washington State University in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Visiting university positions have included National Cheng Kung University, National Sun Yat-Sen University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

He held the Advanced Technology for Electrical Energy Chair at Kumamoto University in Japan from 1999-2000 and was a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Electrical and Communications Systems division of the Engineering directorate from 2004-2006. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.