Join us in welcoming Jordan Kern, one of ISE’s assistant professors, as he discusses the emerging vulnerabilities in low-carbon energy systems. Alums and friends of the program are always welcome.
https://ncsu.zoom.us/j/96681512425?pwd=PgKaPJwsabNGxR6p83pl4BegUxmrbg.1
Meeting ID: 966 8151 2425
Passcode: 699023
Emerging vulnerabilities in low carbon energy systems
This talk will focus largely on a 5-year effort to develop open-source direct current optimal power flow (DC OPF)models and use these to assess the vulnerability of the U.S. bulk power system and its sub-systems to weather and climate extremes. DC OPF model development pulls together concepts from electrical engineering, operations research, and statistics. A typical workflow involves instantiating 100s-1000sof candidate models with different parameterizations (e.g., degree of aggregation, mathematical formulation) to identify versions that balance simulation time and model fidelity, with the latter measured in terms of agreement between predicted and observed shadow costs (dual values). Calibrated models are used to simulate system behavior under weather and climate uncertainty using a novel synthetic generator, which uses time series decomposition and stochastic modeling to increase input data by orders of magnitude. These synthetic datasets have statistical properties that mimic those of the underlying multivariate data but better represent combinatorial extremes that can threaten grid reliability. This talk will also highlight newer research efforts focused on other emerging vulnerabilities for decarbonizing power systems, including terrorism and interdependencies with the natural gas sector.
Jordan Kern is an assistant professor in the NC State Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. From 2018-2023 he was an assistant professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at NC State before moving to ISE. He is a three-time graduate of UNC Chapel Hill (PhD, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, 2014). The U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the State of North Carolina have funded his group. In 2022, he was awarded the NSF CAREER award. Kern has served as an expert witness for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Energy, Climate, and Grid Security, and served as an expert on a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy panel concerning the potential role of artificial intelligence in managing climate change and the energy transition. His group’s research has been featured frequently in national media.
