FALL 2020
"Using Data to Protect America's Grid"
Speaker: Neelanjan Patri of Tennessee Valley Authority
Maintaining a healthy power grid is essential to keeping the lights on. In this talk on improving Grid Reliability with Data & Analytics, Neelanjan Patri will discuss how TVA is using data in an innovative approach to protect and maintain the Valley's power grid. Did you know that 34 percent of people lose power based on lightning strikes? By using high resolution data gathered in the field, we can identify where the grid is vulnerable and better predict asset failure so equipment can be fixed before it fails. Often data sets do not get utilized to drive business outcomes, but at VA, data is crucial to a reliable transmission system and keeping customers out of the dark.
"Low-Carbon Resources for Deep Decarbonization"
Speaker: Neva Espinoza Director, Low-Carbon Technologies, Generation Sector EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute)
People, governments, and companies around the world are embracing the goal of deep carbon emission reductions to improve air quality and address growing concerns around climate change. Although global CO2 emissions continue to rise, many developed countries are lowering energy-related emissions. Viable pathways to substantially lower emissions are emerging, relying primarily on energy efficiency, cleaner electricity, and electrification (replacing direct use of fossil fuels with cleaner electric alternatives). While these strategies provide a path to substantial future emission reductions, deep decarbonization requires fundamental research to develop and demonstrate the low-carbon resources needed to take the final steps toward a low- or no-emission economy.
“The Role of Innovation in Developing the Next Generation Energy Systems”
Speaker: Mark McGranaghan, VP of Innovation at EPRI
We are facing numerous challenges as we try to develop an energy system that is decarbonized, decentralized, and digital? It is clearly a time for innovations to help us on the way. We will explore the opportunities for advances in the next generation power systems and energy systems. How can the internet of things help us? Power electronics? Big data? Artificial intelligence? How will customers and communities help us integrate more renewables and electric vehicles? There are so many opportunities for new engineers and innovators.
“Offshore Wind Energy Development in Americathe United States”
Speaker: Kris Ohleth, Senior Manager – Stakeholder Engagement, Ørsted
Offshore wind energy has been a major source of renewable energy in Europe for nearly three decades; however, there are no utility-scale offshore wind projects here in the United States. Recent developments in the industry over the spring and summer 2019 indicate that might be changing soon with power contracts and offshore leases being let on a record pace. For example, Denmark’s Ørsted. the world’s leading offshore wind developer, has be awarded power contracts to build offshore wind farms by several East Coast states, as well as a variety of other developers who are active in the space. Comes learn more about developments in this exciting and expanding new industry. won New Jersey’s first offshore wind solicitation with a 1.1-gigawatt project known as Ocean Wind, the largest offshore wind project to secure a development deal with a U.S. state to date. Ocean Wind will be built 15 miles from the Atlantic City coast, with construction expected to begin in the early 2020s and finish in 2024. Almost simultaneously, New York state struck deals with Ørsted and another developer to build 1,700 megawatts of capacity off Long Island, aiming to have turbines in operation by 2024. Ørsted plans to include training programs for new workers — seen as a critical need for the U.S. wind industry. The talk will provide an update. Ørsted plans to include training programs for new workers — seen as a critical need for the U.S. wind industry.
“Intelligent Virtual Power Plant”
Speaker: Alberto Columbo & John E. Rogers of DERNetSoft, Inc.
Over the past decade, Distributed Energy Resources adoption has been accelerated considerably due to climate change, lower technology cost, and the need for governments and corporations to meet sustainability goals. Expanding the adoption of DERs brings new challenges for DER owners and providers on how they are designed and operated to deliver the optimal value they’re looking for. The DERNetSoft SaaS platform offers a comprehensive, non-intrusive, and low- cost way to ensure the optimization of all DER assets. This webinar will detail the company history, mission, and vision, and how it uses technology to solve the complex challenges of scalable DER deployment. More specifically, we will discuss DER aggregation optimization for planning and operations and how the DERNetSoft platform makes this process plug and play through our digital platform, providing an innovative tool to scale DER adoption in cities and communities. The Lehigh University ESE projects are directly contributing to the research and development of this AI-based approach.
Energy Technology Innovations: Solutions for Our Global
Speakers:
Fernando Ramirez, Founder of Bridges 2030
Keith Gipson, pioneer in the Buildings IoT, Enterprise Energy Management (EEM) industries and Technology
Kenneth Seeton is the Central Plant Manager and Energy Manager at California State University – Dominguez Hills in Carson, CA.
Today’s technology continues to expand capabilities, innovation and creativity as we seek to address some of humanity’s greatest challenges.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and 2030 Agenda provides a framework for public and private sector to push and explore the boundaries of technology and innovation. Our call to action is a must as our society faces monumental challenges impacting people and planet.
Our crisis of consciousness drives efforts and action by NGO’s, philanthropy and technology companies to support, provide and preserve human dignity by providing basic yet essential services. Bridges 2030, a Philadelphia based NGO, will share an idea currently under development to support vulnerable or disadvantaged communities via the intersection of renewable energy and water.
Energy waste in buildings remains a significant challenge in all parts of the world. The potential to reduce energy consumption in existing and new commercial buildings is enormous. On average, 30% of the energy used in commercial buildings is wasted, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Facil.ai, a California startup, will present the advancements of artificial intelligence technology to automate the optimization of commercial buildings by leveraging existing assets (IoT/BEMS).
Both of these technologies represent real world examples of the measurable impact to communities, to lives, to efficiency and CO2 reduction. The technology is available. The innovation is limitless. The need to take action is urgent.
SPRING 2021
"Ernst & Young Perspective on Energy Trends"
Speaker: Steve Thiel, Partner, Ernst & Young
The broad Energy and Utilities industry ecosystem is facing unprecedented changes and challenges from regulatory, policy and market forces. The traditional electricity and gas utilities are being forced to examine their business and delivery models to remain competitive and relevant. These forces are causing traditional regulated and unregulated market participants to innovate and evolve strategic elements of their value chain opportunistically and defensively. This presentation will explore leading trends affecting the Energy and Utilities markets and highlight significant risk facing market participants. It will also discuss evolving technology that may be driving market change and industry investment.
“Reliability Risk Management with Increasing DER Penetration”
Speaker: James Robinson, Relion Associates
When a home water heater automatically demands 6kW of power, why should you care about an alternating current (AC) “Interconnection” immediate response? When the sun goes down and solar power quickly fades, will renewable energy storage resources immediately respond to meet customer demand? What are the basic Laws of Physics which apply to every Interconnection? Will each Interconnection’s response be dynamically stable and reliable? This seminar explores Risk Management basic and complex case studies which show how we can meet customer reliability expectations . . . even during increased penetration of renewable Distributed Energy Resources (DER). “Interconnection” boundaries vary in size from a multi-Country/State geographical area, territory, island, or an independent micro-grid. Numerous “Interconnection“ geographical boundaries exist worldwide, and size matters. You are likely to someday have customers in many of these Interconnections. Come join us for this seminar!
“Anomaly Detection in Operating Energy Assets Using Advanced Pattern Recognition”
Speaker: Kenny Gross of ORACLE
The Multivariate State Estimation Technique (MSET) is an advanced prognostic pattern recognition method that was originally developed by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) for high-sensitivity prognostic fault monitoring applications in commercial nuclear power and aerospace applications. MSET has since been spun off and met with commercial success for prognostic machine-learning (ML) applications in a broad range of safety critical, mission critical, and business applications, including NASA space shuttles, military gas turbine and ship-propulsion prognostics, Oil-and-Gas exploration and refinery predictive and prescriptive maintenance, human-in-the-loop supervisory control, prognostic cyber security for SCADA assets and networks, as well as Utility distribution grid and renewable asset prognostics. Over the last 20 years, Oracle has pioneered a suite of intelligent-data-preprocessing (IDP) algorithms and automated tuning and sensitivity-optimization algorithms for a second generation MSET called MSET2. MSET2 possesses significant advantages over conventional ML algorithmic approaches, including neural networks, autoassociative kernel regression, and support vector machines. MSET2 advantages: higher prognostic accuracy, earlier warning of incipient anomalies in complex/dynamic/chaotic time-series signatures, lower false-alarm and missed-alarm probabilities (Type-I and -II error rates), and much lower overhead compute cost, which is crucial for real-time dense-sensor streaming prognostics. Each of these advantages for MSET2 will be demonstrated during the presentation for several challenging Energy Industry use cases.
“The Role in Connected Communities in the Modern Grid”
Speaker: Ram Narayanamurthy Program Manager, Energy Utilization of EPRI
Connected Communities (CC) are a group of grid-interactive efficient buildings GEB with diverse, flexible end use equipment and other distributed energy resources (DERs) that collectively work to maximize building, community, and grid efficiency. This talk will focus on how groups of buildings combined with other types of DERs, such as electric vehicle (EV) charging and photovoltaic (PV) generation, can reliably and cost-effectively serve as grid assets by strategically deploying efficiency and demand flexibility. By demonstrating the ability of groups of buildings and DERs to modify load, the outcomes will enable increased energy efficiency, reduced energy demand, and reduced environmental impact. Domestic renewable energy production has been increasing, influencing utility electricity supply operations and creating technical challenges to efficient, cost effective, and reliable grid performance. This, and other reasons including deferred infrastructure investment, have led to a number of federal, regional, and local efforts to modernize the electric grid. . Similarly, advances in electric vehicles (EVs) and energy storage technologies are offering pathways to interact with the electric grid in more dynamic ways. EVs are forecasted to be the largest net increase in load to the utility system in the next twenty years.
“Control & Communication in a 100% Renewable Energy System”
Speaker: Deepak Ramasubramanian, Senior Engineer Scientist, Grid Operations and Planning, Power Delivery and Utilization at EPRI
The changing resource mix of the bulk power system, particularly the increasing deployment of wind power and solar PV, has resulted in an increasing portion of the resource mix being asynchronously connected through inverters - Inverter Based Resources (IBRs). These resources behave differently than traditional synchronous resources, which has necessitated investigation into viable alternate control schemes for use during operation of the system. A major theme of alternate schemes proposed in research has been on ensuring that these IBRs conform to the operational norms and limits that are presently followed. However, as a faster response can be obtained from IBRs, this talk will explore the capabilities to exploit fast response characteristics of an IBR to obtain superior frequency control.
“The Sustainable Energy Fund”
Speaker: John Costlow, President & CEO, Sustainable Energy Fund
Sustainable Energy Fund (SEF) is a 501(c)(3) organization . It was founded in 1999 through a settlement approved by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission during the state’s electric deregulation proceedings. Since then, SEF has been a leading financer of sustainable energy projects and has greatly expanded its services with the goal of seeking a sustainable energy future. The talk will focus on the financial aspects of energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. The session will include introducing economic evaluation methods, including simple payback, internal rate of return, net present value, and life cycle costing. That will then be followed by typical financing methods, including Pennsylvania’s newest Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy Financing.