Evan S. Jones

Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) temperature control of Skipper-CCDs is important for dark matter direct-detection experiments, e.g., SENSEI@MINOS. The project goal is to create an autotuned PID controller in Python to replace expensive Lake Shore temperature controllers.

Smart homes and virtual power plant (VPP) controls are growing fields of research with potential for improved electric power grid operation. A novel testbed for the co-simulation of electric power distribution systems and distributed energy resources (DERs) is employed to evaluate VPP scenarios and propose an optimization procedure. DERs of specific interest include behind-the-meter (BTM) solar photovoltaic (PV) systems as well as heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The simulation of HVAC systems is enabled by a machine learning procedure that produces ultra-fast models for electric power and indoor temperature of associated buildings that are up to 133 times faster than typical white-box implementations. Hundreds of these models, each with different properties, are randomly populated into a modified IEEE 123-bus test system to represent a typical U.S. community. Advanced VPP controls are developed based on the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) 2045 standard to leverage HVAC systems as generalized energy storage (GES) such that BTM solar PV is better utilized locally and occurrences of distribution system power peaks are reduced, while also maintaining occupant thermal comfort. An optimization is performed to determine the best control settings for targeted peak power and total daily energy increase minimization with example peak load reductions of 25+%.

Decarbonization of existing electricity generation portfolios with large-scale renewable resources, such as wind and solar photo-voltaic (PV) facilities, is important for a transition to a sustainable energy future. This paper proposes an ultra-fast optimization method for economic dispatch of firm thermal generation using high granularity, one minute resolution load, wind, and solar PV data to more accurately capture the effects of variable renewable energy (VRE). Load-generation imbalance and operational cost are minimized in a multi-objective clustered economic dispatch problem with various generation portfolios, realistic generator flexibility, and increasing levels of VRE integration. The economic feasibility of thermal dispatch scenarios is evaluated through a proposed method of levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for clustered generation portfolios. Effective renewable economics is applied to assess resource adequacy, annual carbon emissions, renewable capacity factor, over generation, and cost to build between thermal dispatch scenarios with incremental increases in VRE penetration. Solar PV and wind generation temporally complement one another in the region studied, and the combination of the two is beneficial to renewable energy integration. Furthermore, replacing older coal units with cleaner and agile natural gas units increases renewable hosting capacity and provides further pathways to decarbonization. Minute-based chronological simulations enable the assessment of renewable effectiveness related to weather-related variability and of complementary technologies, including energy storage for which a sizing procedure is proposed. The generally applicable methods are regionally exemplified for Kentucky, USA, including eight scenarios with four major year-long simulated case studies and 176 subcases using high performance computing (HPC) systems.

Significant opportunity for savings in energy and investment through improved performance of power distribution systems exists in the optimal placement and rating of capacitors, a conventionally cost-effective and popular reactive power compensating technology. A novel optimal capacitor planning (OCP) procedure is proposed for large-scale utility power distribution systems, which is exemplified on an existing utility circuit of approximately 4,000 buses. An initial sensitivity analysis is employed to intelligently reduce OCP computation time and maintain quality of optimal configurations. Three optimization objectives are considered, including the minimization of total system active power losses, standard deviation of node voltages, and investment in total capacitor power rating. Eight multi-objective optimization methods that employ the non-dominated sorting algorithm III (NSGA-III) concept are compared to determine individual merits. Differences between the methods include the incorporation of a penalty constraint for voltage violations and the automatic readjustment of load-tap-changing (LTC) transformer tap settings for proposed capacitor re-configurations concurrently within the optimizer, which ensures peak system performance and fair comparison to the reference case. A multi-step model conversion process was developed with OpenDSS to enable the OCP procedure to be generally applicable to real large-scale utility circuits. OCP is performed for three example sub-circuits served by a substation with a 48MW, 9Mvar peak load, which represents the most extreme case and offers the best opportunity for savings. Example configurations from the resulting Pareto sets through a pseudo-weight vector approach are also analyzed through a systematic procedure of comparison between the most extreme configuration types to inform configuration selection.

A novel co-simulation framework was developed and demonstrated through virtual power plant (VPP) simulations that include hundreds of unique building models randomly populated into a modified IEEE 123-bus feeder system. The framework employs ultra-fast models for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems as well as building thermal envelopes that are satisfactorily accurate for both electric power and indoor temperature. The approach circumvents generic control time limits typically in conventional implementations by enabling occupant thermal comfort monitoring. The HVAC and building models contain parameters by which they are characterized as generalized energy storage (GES) systems based on Energy Star definitions. This enables their compatibility with the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) 2045 standard control commands and event types. Example CTA-2045 “shed” events are illustrated to exemplify this feature and to analyze power distribution system effects in terms of power flow and voltages.

Separating the HVAC energy use from the total residential load can be used to improve energy usage monitoring and to enhance the house energy management systems (HEMS) for existing houses that do not have dedicated HVAC circuits. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to separate the HVAC dominant load component from the house load. The proposed method utilizes deep learning techniques and the physical relationship between HVAC energy use and weather. It employs novel long short-term memory (LSTM) encoder-decoder machine learning (ML) models, which are developed based on future weather data input in place of weather forecasts. In addition to being used in the proposed HVAC separation method, the LSTM models are employed also for accurate day-ahead HVAC and solar photovoltaic (PV) energy forecasts. To test and validate the proposed method, the SHINES dataset, a publicly available dataset spanning three years at 15-minute time resolution from a large-scale DOE experimental project, is used. Two computational case studies are constructed with a test HEMS to investigate the power regulating capability of smart home virtual operation as dispatchable loads or generators. Prediction results obtained with the proposed method show hourly and daily CV(RMSE) of 29.4% and 11.1%, respectively. These results are well within the bounds of error established by academia and the ASHRAE building model and calibration standards.