Lei Wu Tapped by National Renewable Energy Laboratory as Part of $1.85-Million Project to Improve Nationwide Electricity Grid Operations
The United States electrical grid is a vast patchwork of discrete, yet interconnected, regional power systems, each governed by different organizations, rules, policies and processes. While together they form a single, physical nationwide grid, each separate geographic area is operated independently by different system operators.
Although this setup may optimize efficiency within a particular region, it makes coordinating operations across multiple areas difficult, slow, inefficient and expensive. While one region may have an abundance of cheap electricity in reserve, its regional neighbor may be struggling to keep up with demand with no easy or timely way to borrow resources — resulting in both poor service and high prices for operators and consumers alike.
“Individual operators currently have certain types of coordination, but most of them are happening in a manual manner,” explained Lei Wu, Stevens Institute of Technology Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor and Anson Wood Burchard Chair Professor. “We hope that we can use mathematical models, together with necessary information sharing, to make this coordination more efficient and practical.”
Wu will work with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to address these inefficiencies in power grid coordination. Titled “Addressing Market Design and Operational Gaps for Multiregional Participation with Interregional Operational Coordination (MROC),” the three-year project led by NREL seeks to improve coordination among regional grid operators so the entire U.S. power grid can be run more economically, efficiently and reliably. As part of a $1.85-million project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Wu will receive $267,185 and support one student.
By addressing the mathematical and technical sides of the problem, Wu’s proposed solution will allow for more cost-effective generation and transfer of electricity to the areas of the country that need it most, even in remote areas or regions facing heat waves or other critical emergencies.
Modeling better efficiency
Every day, power grid operators make plans for the next day’s electricity use. They typically have only a few hours to prepare, which limits the time they can spend negotiating for resources with their regional neighbors — which can often require multiple rounds of back-and-forth comparing costs, figuring out how much power can be spared, and agreeing on terms. With such tight deadlines, there’s little room for lengthy negotiations, and current computational methods for aiding these negotiations are limited.
“Through this negotiation, an algorithm may need to run a lot of additional iterations. But there’s not enough computation time available to do it,” said Wu.
To address these operational shortcomings, Wu and his team will research new algorithms for better coordination on NREL’s existing Sienna modeling framework.
Sienna is an open-source platform for production cost and market simulation on energy systems planning and operations. NREL has built Sienna Decomposition with the framework to study multi-stage and multi-region operational coordination, said Wu. “Sienna allows researchers to develop new interregional coordination methods. We will work with NREL to explore new coordination methods.”
A patchwork of challenges
The most direct challenge that the research team faces is computation: how to mathematically improve and enable the coordinated decision-making of multiple regional grid operators within extremely tight time frames. Wu’s mathematical models and approach must be accurate enough, efficient enough and practical enough to be able to deliver solutions for multiple regions in just a couple of hours.
This problem is additionally complicated by the sensitive — and sometimes proprietary — nature of much of this critically necessary information.
“Different operators may not be able to share, for example, their operation costs or other financial or business data with others,” explained Wu. “But effective coordination will only require sharing the necessary non-proprietary information.”
The research team aims to find solutions that optimize the overarching operations of the nationwide grid while simultaneously allowing for implementing customizations that abide by the unique business and information privacy needs of each distinct regional operator.
Benefits across boundaries
By seeking a holistic solution to the varied operational inefficiencies of a power grid system that is physically connected yet operationally isolated, the research team has the opportunity to deliver technical recommendations that could ultimately reshape how electricity is managed across the U.S.
The benefits of such improved efficiencies will not be shared by electricity companies alone. In addition to improved overall service and reliability, everyday consumers will also financially benefit from improved operational coordination through fewer outages and lower utility bills, especially in higher cost-of-living areas — ultimately making the U.S. electrical grid smarter, more resilient and more affordable for all residents.
Disclaimer: This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. Funding provided by U.S. Department of Energy. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.
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