Description | Demand Dispatch and the Zero Marginal Cost Power Grid The talk will survey research at Florida/Inria Paris on harnessing flexible loads to create virtual energy storage at a price much lower than batteries. Distributed control techniques have been devised to achieve two objectives: 1. The grid operator can ramp up and down power consumption from loads in the region, just like charging/discharging a battery 2. The individuals in the population never know that anyone is messing with their appliances. The concept is similar to the distributed congestion control algorithms that make communication networks so reliable today. The details for power systems balancing are very different, as will be explained in the lecture. Sean Meyn was raised by the beach in Santa Monica, California. Following his BA in mathematics at UCLA, he moved on to pursue a PhD with Peter Caines at McGill University. After about 20 years as a professor of ECE at the University of Illinois, in 2012 he moved to beautiful Gainesville. He is now Professor and Robert C. Pittman Eminent Scholar Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Control, and Inria International Chair at Inria, France. During 2018 he is splitting his time between Berkeley, Stanford, NREL, Inria Paris, and Ecole Polytechnique. His interests span many aspects of stochastic control, stochastic processes, information theory, and optimization. For the past decade, his applied research has focused on engineering, markets, and policy in energy systems. |
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