Speaker : Dr. Kai Sun Assistant Professor, the University of Tennessee, USA

Time：9:30-10:30 A.M., May 26, 2016

Site： 3-102, West Main-building

Abstract: Since the 1965 power blackout in North America, power companies have made huge efforts to prevent and mitigate cascading power outages in power grids but catastrophic blackouts continued to happen in many countries of the world. At present, ever-growing penetration of intermittent renewable resources in an interconnected power grid will further increase the complexity of the grid, change its dynamic characteristics, and bring more uncertainties and challenges to daily grid operations. The power industry and the research community have been looking forward to new technology enabling “faster-than-real-time” stability assessment and closed-loop control against blackouts.

The presenter will share his visions in this field and introduce three potential approaches to faster-than-real-time stability assessment and control: 1) wide area measurement system (WAMS) based grid stability assessment; 2) non-iterative semi-analytical solutions of power grid DAE models; 3) application of high-performance supercomputers together with techniques on spatial and temporal partitions of the power grid DAE model for faster computation.

About the Speaker:

Kai Sun is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). He is also a member with the NSF/DOE Engineering Research Center for Ultra-Wide-Area-Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks (CURENT). He received a Bachelor’s Degree in automation in 1999 and a Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering in 2004 from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Before joining the UTK, Dr. Sun was a project manager with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California from 2007 to 2012 for the R&D programs in Grid Operations and Planning. Earlier, he worked as a research associate at Arizona State University in Tempe and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

Dr. Sun is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and an associate editor of IET Generation, Transmission and Distribution. He received the National 100 Excellent Ph.D. Dissertations Award in 2006, EPRI Chauncey Award in 2009 and NSF CAREER Award in 2016. His research areas include power system dynamics, stability and control and complex systems. Dr. Sun is the inventor of one Chinese patent and two US patents.