ISE Welcomes Dr. Jorge Valenzuela on Oct. 19th, 2016

Generating Cheaper and Cleaner Electricity with Flexible Transmission Networks

Seminar by Dr. Jorge Valenzuela

Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Professor and Chair

Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University

Wednesday, October 19, 2016 from 4:00 – 5:00 pm

395 Watts Hall; 2041 College Rd. N.

The generation of electric power presents several challenges. It cannot be conveniently stored. Thus, there should be sufficient production at all times to meet the immediate demand. It uses a mix of energy sources such as nuclear, hydro, coal, oil, gas, wind, solar, and biomass which are usually located at different locations. These sources produce different amounts of emissions and require different investment and operational costs. Both supply and demand are time-dependent and uncertain. The transmission network used to distribute the power to consumption nodes has been usually considered a static structure when economically dispatching power generators. However, multiple studies have reported noticeable savings in power generation costs when dynamically switching transmission lines into/out of service or using dynamic thermal ratings for the transmission lines. In this presentation, I will describe a large-scale mixed integer programming model where the transmission switching and thermal ratings occur at the beginning of a time period (season) and remains unchanged during that period. The objective of the optimization model is to minimize the total energy generation cost over a season subject to loads and N-1 reliability requirements. A decomposition approach is used to solve the optimization problem efficiently. The model is tested on the 14-bus, 39-bus, and 118-bus power systems showing potential cost savings and lower emissions in each case.

Jorge Valenzuela is the Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering at Auburn University. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, a M.S. in Mathematics and Statistics, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering. He was department chair of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department during the period 2011-16. He has received the William Walker Superior Teaching Award and the Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award from the College of Engineering and twice the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award. Dr. Valenzuela teaches courses in operations research and statistics. His research interests lie in the field of energy modeling, optimization and analysis. His research has been funded by the Argonne National Laboratory, National Science Foundation, and USDA Forest Service. He has over 50 scientific publications. One of his papers received the 2012 best published paper in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems award. He is associate editor of Energy Systems. Dr. Valenzuela has chaired the Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment section of INFORMS. He has served as Publication Chair at the INFORMS and the Winter Simulation conferences as well as served as Chair of the Combined Colloquia at INFORMS.