Scalable monitoring and kernel learning for energy grids
Vassilis Kekatos
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Minnesota
12:00pm-1:00pm, Thursday, 13 March 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC
The smart grid vision urges for enhanced situational awareness, sustainability, and economics over our energy systems. While meters are being installed throughout the grid, algorithms that can effectively process this big data deluge are now demanded. Aligned to that end, this talk focuses first on scalable grid monitoring. Albeit control centers monitor their local grids independently, deregulation and renewables call for power system state estimation (PSSE) at the interconnection level. To address the complexity and communication challenges involved, a decentralized PSSE framework based on the alternating direction method of multipliers has been developed. Beyond conventional least-squares, our framework can identify outliers and circuit breaker statuses as verified on IEEE grids having thousands of nodes. Electricity market inference is the second theme of this talk. We will first demonstrate how grid topologies can be revealed using only publicly available real-time energy prices. This becomes feasible after recognizing that the price matrix can be factorized as the product of the grid Laplacian times a low-rank and sparse matrix. Leveraging the link between energy markets and the underlying physical grids, we will then cast day-ahead price forecasting as a kernel learning task. Through a novel nuclear norm-based regularization, kernels across pricing nodes and hours are systematically selected. Numerical tests using real data from the Midwest ISO market corroborate the interpretative merits of our schemes.
Dr. Vassilis Kekatos is currently a postdoctoral associate with the ECE Dept. of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and Science from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2007. In 2009, he received a Marie Curie fellowship. During the summer of 2012, he worked as a consultant for Windlogics Inc. His current interests lie in the areas of signal processing, optimization, and statistical learning towards modernizing our energy systems.
Host: Tulay Adali