Networks and Markets for Scheduling Energy Consumption

Professor Anna Scaglione
Professor, University of California, Davis
Given on: Jan. 23rd, 2014

Abstract

Over the past twenty years power systems and economic theory have merged to co-design market architectures that can competitively price and dispatch in real time generators power, so as to follow the random daily electricity demand. Designed for reliability and to work with poor telemetry, lack of real time situation awareness and to harness limited computational capabilities, these markets favor fossil fuel generation over wind and solar power. What is still lacking are technologies and incentives that would make it possible to use opportunistically abundant renewable energy, without compromising reliability. Responsive and controllable consumption could be used to compensate for the volatility introduced by intermittent resources on the generation side. This would require harnessing the flexibility of large population of responsive appliances and electrical vehicles, connected in an Internet of things that is the grid to respond to their real service needs. What kind of networks communications and computations would be required?

This talk will discuss ongoing research on modeling electrical load demand that can both aid the direct management of these loads as well as facilitate the integration of deferrable loads at the planning stage of the optimal power flow dispatch. We specifically focus on Electrical Vehicle charging and indicate how planning and real time decision can use data that come from these dispatchable loads to optimally schedule their charging. We also will indicate paths to extend this to other loads and challenges that lie ahead in the design of scalable and secure architectures for demand side management in the power grid.

Biography

Professor Anna Scaglione (M.Sc.’95, Ph.D. ’99) is currently Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California at Davis. She joined UC Davis in 2008, after leaving Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where she started as Assistant Professor in 2001 and became Associate Professor in 2006. Prior to joining Cornell she was Assistant Professor in the year 2000-2001, at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Scaglione is a Fellow of the IEEE since 2011. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters from 2012-2013, and served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2002 to 2005, and from 2008 to 2011 in the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing from 2008, where she was Area Editor in 2010-11. She has been general chair of the workshop SPAWC 2005 in the Signal Processing for Communication Committee from 2004 to 2009, has been part of the SmartGridComm steering committee since 2010, and is currently in the Board of Governors of the Signal Processing Society. Dr. Scaglione is the first author of the paper that received the 2000 IEEE Signal Processing Transactions Best Paper Award. She has also received the NSF Career Award in 2002, is co-recipient of the Ellersick Best Paper Award (MILCOM 2005), she co-recipient of the 2013 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award and her student Lin Li is the first author and recipient of the 2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author best paper award. Her expertise is in the broad area of signal processing for communication systems and networks. Her current research focuses on studying and enabling decentralized learning and signal processing in networks of sensors. Dr. Scaglione also focuses on sensor systems and networking models for the demand side management and reliable energy delivery.