Daniel Kirschen
Friday, April 23, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Room 205, 8 St. Mary’s St.
Photonics Building
Professor of Electrical Energy Systems
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
The University of Manchester
“Harnessing the Power of the Demand Side”
Over the last two decades, concerns about climate change have spurred the development of renewable energy sources such as wind farms and solar generation. Unfortunately, integrating a significant amount of these forms of generation in the power system is not a trivial problem because they cannot be controlled in the same way as conventional thermal generating plants. Maintaining the balance between the power produced and the power consumed in the power system is thus going to become more and more difficult as they become a more important fraction of the overall generation portfolio. Rather than throwing money at the problem (i.e. build enough thermal generating plants to compensate for the vagaries of the wind and the sun), this presentation will explore how the flexibility of the demand-side could be harnessed to provide additional control resources. On a time scale of hours, this might involve optimising the production schedule of process industries, while second-by-second balancing could be achieved by switching on and off millions of domestic appliances.
Daniel Kirschen received his Electrical and Mechanical Engineer’s Degree from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium and his Master’s and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. From 1985 to 1994 he worked for Siemens Energy and Automation on the development of advanced software for power system operation. He is currently Professor at The University of Manchester (UK) and Head of the Electrical Energy and Power Systems research group. His current research focuses on how to balance the cost, reliability and environmental impacts of electrical energy. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the IET.
