Saifur Rahman

While central station electric power plants have long provided the bulk of electricity in all industrialized and most developing countries, the traditional need for reliability of electricity supply is now being supplemented by the need for security and environmental sustainability. As many developing countries begin to industrialize to provide jobs and better living conditions to its citizens, and industrialized countries begin to focus on low-carbon energy, the requirements for reliable, secure and environmentally sustainable supply of electricity becomes paramount. While fossil fuels have been the primary sources of electricity for the last one hundred years, their cost, uneven global distribution and global warming potential are encouraging world leaders to look for alternatives in renewable resources, which are distributed. But distributed generation sources have their own challenges - primarily intermittency. Many believe that the smart grid – due to its inherent communication, sensing and control capabilities – will have the ability to manage load, storage and generation assets in the power grid to enable a large scale integration of distributed generation. This talk focuses on potentials for distributed generation and the role the smart grid can play in their integration with the electric power grid.

Biography: Professor Saifur Rahman is the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute (www.ari.vt.edu) at Virginia Tech where he is the Joseph R. Loring professor of electrical and computer engineering. He also directs the Center for Energy and the Global Environment (www.ceage.vt.edu). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE Millennium Medal winner. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Electrification Magazine. He has served as a vice president of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) from 2009 to 2013 and currently serving as a member-at-large of the IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee. In 2006 he served on the IEEE Board of Directors as the vice president for publications. He served as the chair of the US Naitonal Science Foundation Advisory Committee for International Science and Engineering from 2010 to 2013. He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE PES, and has lectured on smart grid, energy efficient lighting solutions, renewable energy, demand response, distributed generation and critical infrastructure protection topics in over 30 countries on all six continents.

Email: