Xiao-Ping Zhang of University of Birmingham

The fundamental approach to implement Net-zero is to massively integrate renewable energy sources into energy supply. With the massive penetration of renewable energy into power systems, variations including fluctuations and intermittency of output powers of these renewable sources are of great concerns. It is evidenced that with the high penetration of renewable energy, variations of renewable energy have increased the costs of UK’s balancing markets very significantly. Therefore, there are needs to introduce a new technical framework, namely, ‘energy quality’ to (a) define the quality of power waveforms; (b) propose measures/indices to characterize the variations (fluctuations and intermittences) of powers and power flows; (c) present methods to improve energy quality. Finally, examples will be given to show how the renewable energy variations can be mitigated via effective power aggregation/system interconnections.

Biography:

Professor Zhang is currently Chair in Electrical Power Systems, Director of Smart Grid, Birmingham Energy Institute at the University of Birmingham, UK. He co-authored books including the monograph “Flexible AC Transmission Systems: Modelling and Control” by Springer and “Restructured Electric Power Systems: Analysis of Electricity Markets with Equilibrium Models” by IEEE Press/Wiley. Prof Zhang is an IEEE PES Distinguished Lecturer on HVDC, FACTS and Wave Energy Generation. Professor Zhang is Chair of the IEEE WG on Test Systems for Economic Analysis. Professor Zhang has been made an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to “modeling and control of high-voltage DC and AC transmission systems.” He is also a Fellow of IET and Chartered Engineer. Professor Zhang has been appointed to the Expert Advisory Group of UK Government’s Offshore Transmission Network Review since 2020. He has been appointed to Senior Editor of IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy since Nov 2023.