Speaker: Dr. Maria Vrakopoulou (Lecturer, The University of Melbourne, Australia)

Title: Decision-making with Reliability Guarantees under Renewable Energy Uncertainty

Abstract: Renewable Energy Sources (RES) offer environmentally friendly, sustainable, and cheap energy. However, RES power generation (such as wind and solar power) is characterized by high variability and uncertainty that may negatively impact power system reliability. Installations and control of energy storage systems (ESSs), such as batteries, fuel cells and thermal energy storage, can play a significant role in RES integration as their fast response and flexible consumption/generation over time could alleviate the aforementioned challenge. Given the massive growth of RES installations, there is a need to determine the most appropriate operational decisions for economic and reliable power systems. Several decision-making methodologies incorporate uncertainty in a robust way, using assumptions on the uncertainty probability distribution or heuristically chosen sets of uncertainty scenarios. However, such methodologies may result in conservative and unreliable solutions.

This talk will present a framework for chance-constrained reformulation of grid operation problems to account for RES uncertainty. The chance-constrained problem is tackled by utilizing data-based optimization techniques that provide solutions with probabilistic guarantees without relying on underlying distributions of the uncertainty. The proposed framework offers solutions with reliability guarantees and a tunable trade-off between operational cost and reliability levels. A key aspect is the utilization of control policies that take the form of piecewise affine functions of the uncertainty and represent an adaptive control of flexible resources. The latter achieves both lower operational cost and higher allowable RES penetration. Energy and reserve scheduling reformulations will be discussed with examples that consider a variety of flexible components, including thermostatically controlled loads with battery-type dynamics. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of extensions that enable future decision-making schemes for distribution systems that are rich in distributed energy resources such as solar power and ESS.

Bio: Maria Vrakopoulou is a Lecturer in the Power and Energy System group at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. She received her diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece in May 2008, and her PhD degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland in June 2014. Dr. Vrakopoulou pursued her research as a post-doc in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA for a year, and then she earned a 3-year Marie Curie fellowship award to continue her post-doctoral research in the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Her research interests concentrate on the optimization and analysis of planning and operation problems for power systems under renewable generation uncertainty.

WED 26 APRIL 16:00-17:00 (AEST, Melbourne Time) ONLINE

ZOOM MEETING ID: 873 1557 5255; PASSWORD: 778635