Dr. Chowdhury wins Engineering Research Center Planning grant
A three-university team (UNC Charlotte, North Carolina State University and Clemson University) along with Duke Energy has recently won a National Science Foundation (NSF) planning grant to identify the potential for an engineering research center. The team led by PI Prof. Badrul Chowdhury will use the award amount $99,623 for one year to identify the need and a potential pathway to a sustainable carbon-neutral electricity ecosystem that optimizes for stability, reliability, affordability, and carbon neutrality, while also accommodating a relentless list of need such as new stakeholders, industry models, and regulatory policies, promising digital technology advances, the variability and uncertainty in human behavior, the expected and unexpected transitions to more sustainable energy solutions, the need for flexibility and agility, and the anticipated climate variability.
If successful, the planned ERC will be the first of its kind to bring convergence to power systems modeling and simulation with human-centered models. The approach is critical, transformative, sustainable, and realistic, which not only leads us to a carbon-neutral energy grid but also provides full human interaction and customer participation in a highly automated, large-scale planning and operational framework. This ERC planning grant will further identify gaps, and potential stakeholders including team expansion, and key personnel and evaluate the goal and overarching objectives for the future center. Additionally, the potential ERC will have a broad set of university researchers and key industry stakeholders across a broad range of disciplines and backgrounds that plans to develop new science, enabling technology, and systems integration based on revolutionary improvements in predicting interactions by prosumers, a new blend of consumer and producer who responds to the available energy supply in complex ways governed by a system of transactional energy. This ERC aims to achieve a quantum leap by utilizing a digital twin (see Figure 1) that simultaneously manages complex scale and complex interdependencies. The PIs’ direct involvement in cutting-edge digital-twin development provides them the perspective to note that effectively addressing the challenges of integrating technologies at scale in an uncertain political, financial, and socio-economic landscape requires the type of transformative and convergent work that can only be performed through an ERC.