ECE/CEESI Colloquium, Oct. 19, Scott Backhaus
Scott Backhaus
Los Alamos National Lab
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011, at 3 PM
Photonics Building, Room 339
Smart Grid Monitoring and Control Concepts
Modernization of the electrical grid to accommodate time-intermittent renewable generation and distributed energy resources presents several new challenges, however, these challenges also provide new opportunities to reconsider how the grid is monitored and controlled. We will describe concepts that address both areas. Compared to today’s relatively controlled time evolution, the variability of transmission-scale wind and photovoltaic generation will cause rapidly changing grid conditions that will severely tax the computational resources used to simulate the dynamical behavior of the grid and assess its dynamical stability. Rapid variability will also require rapid model updating, calling into question the accuracy of such detailed dynamical models. To address these issues, we demonstrate the feasibility of a model-independent, computationally fast, coarse-grained representation of grid dynamics that is extracted directly from the ambient grid frequency noise enabling continuous, on-line model updating. Second, we describe methods of statistical control of large families of similar distributed energy resources such as groups of electric vehicles or distributed photovoltaic generators. These methods are designed to provide near optimal control without requiring direct control over every endpoint device.
Scott Backhaus received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley in the area of macroscopic quantum behavior of superfluid 3He and 4He. He came to Los Alamos in 1998 as a Director’s Funded Postdoc from 1998 to 2000, a Reines Postdoctoral Fellow from 2001 to 2003, and a Technical Staff Member from 2003 to the present. While at Los Alamos, Backhaus has performed both experimental and theoretical research in the area of thermoacoustic energy conversion including fundamental topics such as several thermoacoustic streaming instabilities, streaming assisted heat transfer, and acoustic power manipulation. He holds seven patents in the area of thermoacoustics, and his work has been recognized with several awards including an R&D 100 award in 1999 and Technology Review’s “Top 100 Innovators Under 35” award in 2003. Recently, his attention has shifted to other energy-related topics including the fundamental science of geologic carbon sequestration and grid-integration of renewable generation.
