FIU College of Engineering and Computing

Florida International University - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Main Content

Arif I. Sarwat is the fourth FIU ECE professor to receive an NSF CAREER Award in 2015. His project, titled "Cyber Physical Solution for High Penetration Renewables in Smart Grid," will further effeciency at control centers for electric utilities. 

Effective integration of large amounts of renewable energy into the grid is of utmost importance for sustainable future and greener smart cities. Due to the unpredictable variations in weather, over 80% of the available renewable energy from solar and wind sources cannot be harnessed effectively.

Large scale and cost-effective integration of photovoltaic energy into the smart grid is challenging due to: (a) unpredictability and intermittency of weather pattern, (b) fast morning ramp up and afternoon ramp down of solar generation that triggers instabilities in the grid, (c) unavailability of solar generation at sun down requiring the need for locational energy storage facilities, and (d) lack of technologies for efficient and intelligent on-demand sharing of solar generation with conventional power generation in the grid.

This research brings a holistic vision of the future smart grid as a synergistic integration of its various components with novel computational tools for forecasting and intelligent load sharing with distributed energy storage.

The study collects real-time Photovoltaic (PV) data from the plant, conducts high-end modeling, analysis and visualization on various datasets to understand, predict and mitigate the system instabilities and fluctuations triggered by PV intermittencies. This solution can be used in the planning process at the command and control centers for electric utilities.

CAREER: Cyber Physical Solution for High Penetration Renewables in Smart Grid
Start date: May 1st, 2016
Amount: $82,837.00