The Architecture of Green Energy Systems: The Underlying Problem and Its Challenges

Rapidly growing renewable generations and peak loads pose a serious threat to the security and reliability of modern power and energy systems. A critical question is “how to accommodate a high penetration of renewable generation and deep electrification?”. This talk studies coordinating large-scale distributed energy resources and focuses on two key challenges, including unknown information and the scalability issue. Two examples will be presented to develop distributed learning-assisted decision-making methods to address these challenges. One example is zeroth-order optimization with application to model-free optimal voltage control for handling unknown physical system models, and the other is online learning and human-in-the-loop decision-making for residential demand response to deal with unknown human user behaviors.

The management of biodiversity and climate change is delicate, due to conflicts with economic development, to inertia and delayed impacts of decisions on long horizon times, and to pervasive uncertainties. This makes it a relevant area for decision under uncertainty methods. First, I will provide an overview of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reports. Second, I will present theory and examples related to sustainability and resilience. Third, I will discuss opportunities to introduce risk measures as a way to handle riskand to design robust policies. Keyword list: sustainability, resilience, viability, stochastic optimization, risk

 To combat global warming, energy systems need to go through broad and deep decarbonization in the coming decades. Electric power system plays a crucial role in leading the global energy system transition. In this talk, we will address some foundational issues in the planning and operation of electric power systems and showcase how operations research (OR) and optimization can make significant impacts by providing critical decision tools and insights. We will also discuss challenges and progresses in sustainable transitions of broader infrastructure systems, such as electrification of public transportation and capacity planning of battery recycling facilities. Finally, we will reflect on our past efforts in bridging OR to the broader scientific communities and share our outlook on future directions.

The transition towards clean, sustainable energy systems requires integrating terawatts of variable renewable generation and the vast electrification of transportation, heating, cooling loads. At this scale, renewable generation and electrification will reshape electric demand patterns, strain grid infrastructures, and challenge traditional grid operations. To overcome these challenges  and effectively achieve decarbonization goals will require the engineering of scalable architectures to manage the integration efficiently.  Intelligent electrification focuses on coordinating responsive electric loads and distributed energy resources (DERs) to leverage their potential for flexibility to mitigate distribution system grid bottlenecks and unlock valuable grid services while ensuring end-use comfort and quality of service (QoS). Thus, effective cyber-physical coordination across spatio-temporal scales is crucial to enhance grid reliability and resilience and maximize the deployment of renewable sources within grid hosting capacity limits. This talk will discuss the engineering challenges associated with implementing and scaling architectures for intelligent electrification, including feedback control, optimization, and cyber-physical interactions between the grid and devices.