Today’s power systems are operated and controlled in a centralized way, under which monitoring and control tasks are handled at different hierarchical levels. However, emerging technologies, such as distributed solar generators, electric vehicles, and energy storage devices, pose new challenges to the operation and control of legacy power systems due to the increased scale and complexity. To overcome these challenges, it is envisioned that future, smart grids will be populated with multiple decision makers. These economically motivated agents are called prosumers (producer-consumers), which can make strategic decisions empowered by a cyber-layer superposed on top of the physical grid. Under the prosumer-based framework, smart grids will be operated and controlled in a distributed way. The challenges are thus how to gracefully extend the current control and management paradigm to power grid networks comprised of thousands of prosumers.
In this seminar, I will discuss my recent efforts to address one particular, technical aspect of the prosumer-based smart grids, namely the frequency regulation problem. I will present a distributed architecture for frequency regulation and address the problem of how thousands of sparsely located prosumers can regulate frequency in a distributed and robust manner.
Masoud Nazari is Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at California State University, Long Beach. His background is in power and control systems. Prior to joining CSULB, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in electrical energy at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2013 to 2015. He received his first M.Sc. in Energy Systems from the Sharif University of Technology in 2005 and obtained his second M.Sc. and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 and 2012, respectively. He was also a visiting PhD student at MIT Engineering Systems Division in 2011.
Dr. Nazari consults with industry in the areas of smart grid and power system control and is the technical program committee member at IEEE Green Energy and Systems Conference.
His research interests include: cyber-physical smart grid control; distributed algorithms for energy systems; economic impacts of emerging technologies on electricity markets; large-scale integration of renewable energy sources; and, policy implication for modernizing legacy power systems.
