Power Engineering Laboratory

​

RESEARCH FOCUS

​

Sustainable Grid needs power-electronic DC/AC converters, termed as inverters, to interface the renewable resources with the existing AC power grid. These inverter-based renewables vary in size—from residential-scale (kW) to utility-scale (MW)—and are interconnected throughout the power system. This is poised to fundamentally change the operation of the grid, i.e., from a few spinning electromechanical machines to many power electronic inverters. With the grid inertia reducing, there is now an industry consensus on the need for inverter-based resources (IBRs) to partake in some functions such as frequency and voltage regulations, and inertial response. Such IBRs are called grid-forming (GFM) inverters, and are now being integrated in grids around the world. 

As more GFM inverters are connected to the power grid, they tend to interact amongst themselves and lead to new instability properties in the absence of coordination; implementing such coordination is challenging in the context of large-scale grid-edge integration of intermittent renewables, given their dispersed geographical availability.

​

Grid Resilience describes the ability of the grid to minimize consequences from disruptions including operating uncertainties from new technologies, prosumer behaviors, and malicious attacks on the system integrity. Coupled with the large-scale IBR integration problem, are the increasing dependence on communication infrastructure and the increasing participation of prosumers (producers+consumers) in the power grid operation. While the former raises obvious concerns about cyber-physical resilience, our research has shown for the first time that the latter can also be subject to behavioral manipulation attacks through social media, adding another dimension of vulnerability to the modern power grid.

We are the pioneer of combining computational social science with power system analysis, thereby explicitly closing the loop between the cyber-physical system and the users that interact with them. I call this society-in-the-loop analysis of power systems, which has 1) revealed previously unknown mechanisms through which end-user-behavior-targeted manipulation can reduce the resilience of the power grid, and 2) how grid data can be used as an indicator of social behavior during unprecedented and disruptive times such as a pandemic. 

​