Category: News

Konstantinos Oikonomou, a second-year PhD student at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) receives a prestigious scholarship from the Utah Governor’s Office of Energy Development (OED) and Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) through the Energy Research Triangle (ERT) Scholars competitive grant program.

Konstantinos is pursuing his PhD degree at the ECE’s Utah Smart Energy Lab (U-Smart) under the supervision of Prof. Parvania. Konstantinos is interested in developing solutions for ensuring efficient and sustainable supply of electricity and water demand in urban areas that is becoming a challenge as urban population continues to grow with rapid pace. His research develops control methods to co-optimize the operation of urban power and water distribution systems in emerging smart cities, saving considerable amounts of precious energy and water resources.

“ERT continues to support Governor Gary R. Herbert’s vision for accelerating Utah-based solutions to power our energy future,” said Laura Nelson Ph.D., the Governor’s energy advisor and executive director of the Governor’s Office of Energy Development. The ERT-Scholars grant encourages training of Utah’s next generation of energy researchers. “ERT-Scholars creates a pipeline of talent for Utah’s energy industry by awarding highly-motivated young scientists who are passionate about making real changes in the way Utah thinks about energy,” says Ivy Estabrooke PhD, executive director of USTAR.

Source: USTAR

Rebecca Novy, an undergraduate student at the U-Smart lab, is selected to receive an award from the IEEE PES Scholarship Plus Initiative for the 2016/2017 academic year.

Rebecca is an outstanding student interested in power and energy systems, and passionate about pursuing her career in the power industry. She is also vice-chair of the IEEE PES Student Chapter at the University of Utah’s ECE Department, helping other students to learn more about the power and energy systems.

The award is very selective. Only 230 students across the USA, Canada and Puerto Rico receive the award. The award is given to undergraduate students in electrical engineering who have expressed interest in the power and energy field and who have maintained high GPAs. The $2,000 annual award is renewable for up to three years.

The 10th Annual Trans-Atlantic Infraday Conference was held at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Washington, DC, on Thursday, November 10, 2016. More info at the conference website: http://systems.jhu.edu/10th-annual-trans-atlantic-infraday-conference/

Dr. Parvania presented at the confernece on “Continuous-time Marginal Pricing in Electricity Markets”. The presentation was based on a recently published paper on continuous-time marginal pricing of electricity in power systems.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) held a technical conference on June 27-29, 2016 to discuss opportunities for increasing real-time and day-ahead market efficiency through improved software.
Dr. Parvania presented at the conference on recent developments on novel continuous-time Unit Commitment (UC) model for power systems operation. The new continuous-time UC model schedules for continuous-time power and ramping trajectories of generating units. In addition, the model enables the continuous-time marginal pricing of electricity in power systems. The presentation is available online here.

 

Dr. Parvania receives a National Science Foundation (NSF) Award for his new development on continuous-time flexiblity scheduling in electricity markets. The research offers a solution for the ramping scarcity problem in electricity markets with providing a continuous-time schedule for the generating units in day-ahead electricity markets, thus naturally taking care of sub-houlry and fast ramping of renewable energy resources.