Associate Professor in the CCEE Department at NCSU. Adjunct Professor at NCCU. Interested in data-driven optimization, analytics, and sustainable systems.
Victor de Faria and Neda Jamaleddin, Ph.D. students at NCSU, presented yesterday our work on Assessing the Risk of Hurricane Damage to Marine Hydrokinetic Devices at Ocean Renewable Energy Conference in Portland. This conferences was sponsored by the University Marine Energy Research Community (UMERC) and the The Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS). This work shows the developments of the research project led by professor Mo Gabr from NCSU and myself and has been sponsored by the NC Reneable Ocean Energy Program (NCROEP). We used Bayesian analysis and mechanical model simulations in Ansys-Aqwa to create fragility curve estimates for ocean current devices. The picture below shows Victor and Neda meeting with George Bonner (NCROEP program director).
Neda Jamaleddin, George Bonner and Victor de Faria at the Ocean Renewable Energy Conference in Portland
The first report of the Open Energy Outlook (OEO) has been published. I am very happy to see this project milestone been accomplished. Congratulations to the co-PIs Paulina Jaramillo, Joseph DeCarolis (former co-PI now at EIA), Jeremiah Johnson and the whole OEO core team. The OEO is an initiative of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and NC State University that aims to examine U.S. energy futures to inform energy and climate policy efforts by applying policy-focused academic modeling. One of the main goals of the OEO is to maximize transparency, and build a networked community. The project has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The modeling effort is based on Tools for Energy Model Optimization and Analysis developed at NC State University in previous grants. The technical report can be accessed at the CMU website linked here.
One of the best and most bright students that I have worked with during my career was recently hired by the prestigious Binghamton University. Neha Patankar, who I had the privilege to co-mentor with professor Joseph DeCarolis at the Operations Research Graduate program at NC State University, was offered a position to be a tenure-track assistant professor of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering. After her Ph.D. at NC State, Neha work a postdoc for a few years at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University working with professor Jesse Jenkings. An excerpt from Binghamton University webpage: “Neha Patankar’s expertise is in multi-attribute computational modeling and decision-making for energy transition, focusing on the rapidly evolving electricity sector. Her research supports energy policy decisions under deep techno-economic uncertainty, reveals system-wide technology and resource tradeoffs, and evaluates pathways for economy-wide decarbonization.” Dr. Patankar has a bright future ahead of her and Binghamton University and its students are lucky to have her as a faculty that will perform top-notch research and teaching related to decision-making and the energy transition. Congrats again Neha! (click here for Neha’s Linkedin post)
Neha Patankar, Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Binghamton University
It was great to see Al Gore present today The Case for Climate Optimism in the Frontiers Forum. Thank you to the amazing speaker and to the Frontiers organizers (Kamila Markram and her team) to have provided a great event for approximately 5000 participants. People are experiencing critical times due to changes in climate and the future is in our hands to make the necessary changes. Towards a cleaner, renewable and sustainable world. Frontiers made available the talk on their youtube channel and it is linked below.
Back in 2012, after my Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin, I joined research projects on Analytics applied to energy systems in Brazil. One of those was related to efficiency analysis of electricity Distribution companies (DISCOs) and methods such the data envelopment analysis. On that topic I started to work with an undergraduate student Giulia Medeiros at Universidade Federal de Itajubá in a collaboration with professors José Wanderley Marangon Lima and Luana Medeiros Marangon Lima. In November of the same year I went back to the US for the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix AZ where I had a talk about Stochastic Optimization and Energy. After the conference I had the opportunity to go back to Austin and discuss ideas with my former Ph.D. advisor David Morton. At that same week I was able to watch the weekly OR seminar (I remember so many of those as student), where professor Ahti Salo as a guest speaker was talking about a new method that he developed the Ratio-based efficiency analysis (REA). The talk caught my attention and at the end I was deeply interested in the method, I asked a few questions and mentioned the efficiency analysis of electricity DISCOs that we were working on (thinking we potentially could apply). Professor J. Eric Bickel, which was coordinating the seminar series that semester, replied at the time as well and said that this could be a nice way to rank the electric utilities, that helped to increase the brightness of the light bulb :) I came back to Brazil and started to explain the idea to my colleagues and Giulia Medeiros, who quickly accepted the research challenge and started to attempt making the new application of the REA a reality. After lots of time spending studying, training in scientific programming and algebraic modeling in Python and Pyomo, she was able to create efficiency analysis optimization models and extrapolate the analysis of DISCOs for the whole Brazilian power grid. Many things happened along the process, Giulia finished her degree in electrical engineering and her masters in the same field and started to pursue her Ph.D. Recently she achieved her first journal publication in the topic with others manuscripts in preparation. I need to say that I am extremely proud of her, for the hard work, knowledge developed and her courage to explore complex problems. I need to thank each people named here for the things that happened, for the opportunity to interact with them during this process and for sharing knowledge. We thank also CPFL Energia who funded this ANEEL R&D grant. Research is fascinating to me and I hope to develop this feeling and spark lights in the lives of my students as my professors did and still do.
Approximately 4 years ago, we embarked on a journey around the world of machine learning and artificial neural networks to seek ways where we could achieve improvements associated with the process of forecasting natural water inflows at hydroelectric power plants. Victor A. D. Faria, at that time still a graduate student in the electrical engineering course at the Federal University of Itajubá, and today a Ph.D. at North Carolina State University, accepted the research challenge with me, and professors José Wanderley Marangon Lima and Luana Medeiros Marangon Lima. Since then, a lot has happened and many fruits are being harvested with an unprecedented and important publication in the International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology that deals with water inflow forecasting using multi-layer Perceptrons neural networks for all hydroelectric plants that participate in centralized dispatch in the Brazilian power system. Results obtained in this study point to greater accuracy and precision of the neural network models developed in relation to those obtained by the models in use in the Brazilian electricity sector. This work comes at a very important time for the sector, where concerns associated with droughts, hydrothermal dispatch and energy prices are in the spotlight. In order to plan and make more robust decisions, it is necessary to improve the representation of future uncertainties (water inflows, electricity demand, wind and solar generation, climate/weather, etc). Congratulations Victor for your dedication and hard work and also to everyone else involved in the work for their important contributions. Article link: An assessment of multi-layer perceptron networks for streamflow forecasting in large-scale interconnected hydrosystems
It has been a great ride and opportunity to work with Hadi Eshraghi during his Ph.D. at NCSU. Hadi is a bright and extremely capable professional that always brings knowledge and commitment to work to be pursued. He developed impactful research at the CCEE department at NCSU and published technical papers in top journals such as Energy and Enviromental Science and Technology (ES&T). I cannot be more proud and thankful for been part of this. Congrats Hadi!
Very happy to see this published at Energy for Sustainable development from Elsevier. This is a fruit of collaboration with Neha Patankar (first author - congrats Neha! She is a Ph.D. candidate in OR at North Carolina State University - NCSU) and professors Joseph DeCarolis (NCSU), Morgan D. Bazilian Colorado School of Mines) and Deb Chattopadhyay (The World Bank). This piece explores electricity planning strategies in a conflict-prone environment. A stochastic energy system optimization model that explicitly considers the possibility of armed conflict leading to electric power generator damage is proposed. Our analysis for South Sudan shows that solar photovoltaics can play a critical role in composing the future electric power system for the country. In addition to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and increasing access to electricity, the analysis suggests that solar energy can be used to hedge against economic losses incurred by conflict. While this piece focuses on South Sudan, the analytical framework can be applied to other conflict-prone countries.
NCSU and NCCU research team drafted a proposal in late 2017 to the NC Policy Collaboratory that outlines our approach to this study. This effort was mandated through the NC General Assembly’s authorization language from HB 589 (2017) (see Part XII, Section 12). The project final report was submitted to the NC General Assembly on December 3 of 2018. In addition to the report, data and models used to perform the analysis are publicly available and can be found at the energy storage study website hosted at NCSU.
I am glad to say that as result of an amazing collaboration work with Ph.D. candidate Faeza Hafiz and professors Iqbal Husain and Poria Fajri two new journal papers were published in the last few days. The first one on the technical journal Applied Energy from Elsevier proposes a novel energy management framework and energy storage sizing for a community composed of multiple houses and distributed solar generation. A multi-stage stochastic program model is designed to minimize community electricity purchase costs and to support decision-making by creating control policies for energy management. The second paper was published in the IEEE Electrification Magazine and talks about challenges and solutions for coordinated control at the residential level in modern power systems with the increasing deployment of solar energy, storage and plug-in electric vehicles. Congrats to my colleagues and especially to Faeza Hafiz (first author in both papers) that is heating up her engines for her Ph.D. defense (12/04/2018) at the FREEDM system center at North Carolina State University.
I am glad to see this piece published in the journal Renewable Energy from Elsevier. This is a joint piece with Victor Durães (his 2nd journal collaboration as undergrad) and professors Luana Medeiros Marangon Lima from Duke University and José Wanderley Marangon Lima from Universidade Federal de Itajubá. Here, we analyze potential impacts of climate change in the revenues of hydropower plants. One important input for designing and evaluating investment opportunities in #hydropower is the water inflows historical data. However, such information alone may not project well future power generation due to the influence of climate change in the water inflow patterns. This paper introduces spatio-temporal information of the future climate into the operational planning of the Brazilian power systems. Global climate models from IPCC are considered along with downscaled regional climate models. Results at the individual plant level show the importance of taking into account climate change information when performing hydro generation planning studies.
Happy to see this work focused in contracting wind-photovoltaic projects in power systems been published at Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews. This is a joint piece with Giancarlo Aquila (1st author, congrats Gian!), Edson Pamplona, LCS Rocha, PP Balestrassi, P Rotela and Marcelo Nunes Fonseca. Brazil has recently seen a significant raise in the development of wind-solar PV hybrid plants. This work presents a model to assist the government in long-term energy auctions seeking to maximize socioeconomic welfare in the power sector. Multiobjective programming is used to simultaneously handle two conflictive objective functions (maximize reduced emission density and minimize the levelized cost of electricity). The approach uses mixture design of experiments and the normal boundary intersection method to perform the optimization and construct Pareto frontiers for the evaluated projects. Additionally, a metric based on the ratio between entropy and the global percentage error is used to identify the optimal Pareto solution.
What a great day at the IEEE PES GM in Portland OR. Early In the morning we were able to participate in the Panel Session about Big Data Analytics for flexible Electricity Networks, Markets and Prosumers, where I gave a talk about Data Analytics to Improve Wind and Hydro Coordination under the Threat of Climate Change. This was a joint work originated from the master’s research of Nayana Scherner. There were great other talks in this session chaired by prof Tao Hong, such as his in the topic about opportunities for Energy Analytics professionals. Later in the day other great topics were discussed in the conference such as the 100% penetration of renewables as well as future possibilities for electricity markets under potential new environments with zero marginal cost.
The work of my student Victor de Faria in Game theory and optimization of Firm Energy Rights allocation was recently published in the professional journal Applied Energy. Very proud and happy for him!
