Dr. Ning Zhou of Binghamton University

About the Topic:

To make well-informed decisions, power system operators need accurate real-time estimates of the operational conditions of the power grid. Up to the present time, conventional static state estimators have been widely deployed in utility control centers to improve the estimation accuracy and expand the monitoring areas. However, these estimators are no longer sufficient for monitoring the modern power grid, which is experiencing increasing uncertainty and variation driven by the high penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources (mainly solar and wind). In fact, conventional static state estimation methods for power grids often fail in providing any useful information during transmission-line tripping and cascading grid failures when the power system rapidly changes, and state estimation results are crucially needed.

To ensure well-informed decision making, phasor measurement units (PMUs) are deployed at an accelerating speed. Also, a dynamic state estimation (DSE) approach is proposed that can not only estimate current operational conditions but also predict their future trends, and quantify their uncertainty. To minimize the financial cost of measurement devices while achieving observability of important system states, observability and detectability studies are carried out to guide measurement placement and model selection.  It is shown that a stable observer model using terminal voltage as inputs are preferred and the DSE methods can leverage the PMU data to effectively and timely estimate the dynamic states of the power grid.

Biography:

Ning Zhou (S’01- M’05- SM’08) is currently with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Binghamton University as an associate professor. In 2005, he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with a minor in statistics from the University of Wyoming. From 2005 to 2013, Dr. Zhou worked as a power system engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His research interests include power system dynamics and statistical signal processing. Dr. Zhou is a senior member of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES). He has been an associate editor for IET Generation Transmission and Distribution since 2016. He is the lead author of the 2009 Technical Committee Prize Paper from the IEEE/PES Power System Dynamic Performance Committee.  He has been the co-Chair of IEEE PES Working Group on Data Access and secretary of IEEE PES Task Force on Oscillation Source Location since 2016. He is the recipient of the 2009 Outstanding Engineer of Year Award from IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Richland Chapter. He is the recipient of IEEE PES Outstanding Branch Counselor Award in 2017. He is the PI of the NSF CAREER award titled “Integrated Dynamic State Estimation for Monitoring Power Systems under High Uncertainty and Variation” in the year of 2019.

Email:

Address:4400 Vestal Parkway Est, ECE Department, Binghamton, New York, United States, 13902