Events Calendar

CEE Ph. D. Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Ram Rajagopal, Stanford University

Talk Title: Demand Management in Smart Grids: Architecture, Data Analytics and Control.

Abstract: Increased penetration of renewable generation in the grid has required the development of novel power management approaches capable of handling the significant increase in uncertainty. A major focus has been demand-side management and control, including investigations of demand response and load scheduling mechanisms. Yet, the performance and scalability of existing methodologies is limited, and little is known about the broader potential of these mechanisms in realistic scenarios. Moreover, in many instances demand side management practice has failed to account appropriately for the additional uncertainty generated by consumer behavior. This talk presents a architecture for demand management that organizes consumers around communities (or clusters). Power management is implemented as a multi-scale hierarchical risk limiting control solution in such communities. Scalable demand-side behavioral analytics for segmenting, targeting, ranking and community design are presented, relying on new observations of consumer behavior from the large amounts of data collected in smart grids. Novel performance metrics for the architecture are estimated from the data to illustrate the potential of the proposed approach. If time permits, some applications to parking management are also presented.

Bio: Ram Rajagopal is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab (S3L), focused on large scale monitoring, data analytics and stochastic control for infrastructure networks, in particular energy and transportation. His current research interests in power systems are in integration of renewables, smart distribution systems and demand-side data analytics. Prior to his current position he was a DSP Research Engineer at National Instruments and a Visiting Research Scientist at IBM Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and an M.A. in Statistics, both from the University of California Berkeley, Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas, Austin and Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a recipient of the Powell Foundation Fellowship, Berkeley Regents Fellowship and the Makhoul Conjecture Challenge award. He holds more than 30 patents from his work, and has advised or founded various companies in the fields of sensor networks, power systems and data analytics.

Pizza is served following the presentation in KAP 147.

Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes