Xingpeng Li

University of Houston | U of H, UH · Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

The fast growth of inverter-based resources such as wind plants and solar farms will largely replace and reduce conventional synchronous generators in the future renewable energy-dominated power grid. Such transition will make the system operation and control much more complicated; and one key challenge is the low inertia issue that has been widely...

Power flow analysis plays a crucial role in examining the electricity flow within a power system network. By performing power flow calculations, the system's steady-state variables, including voltage magnitude, phase angle at each bus, active/reactive power flow across branches, can be determined. While the widely used DC power flow model offers sp...

With the increasing penetration of converter-based renewable resources, different types of dynamics have been introduced to the power system. Due to the complexity and high order of the modern power system, mathematical model-based inertia estimation method becomes more difficult. This paper proposes two novel machine learning assisted inertia esti...

Security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) is a computationally complex process utilized in power system day-ahead scheduling and market clearing. SCUC is run daily and requires state-of-the-art algorithms to speed up the process. The constraints and data associated with SCUC are both geographically and temporally correlated to ensure the reliabil...

This paper investigates how to efficiently and economically deliver offshore energy generated by offshore wind turbines to onshore. Both power cables and hydrogen energy facilities are analyzed. Each method is examined with the associated proposed optimal sizing model. A cost-benefit analysis is conducted, and these methods are compared under diffe...

This paper proposes a decentralized energy management (DEM) strategy for a network of local microgrids, providing economically balanced energy schedules for all participating microgrids. The proposed DEM strategy can preserve the privacy of each microgrid by only requiring them to share network power exchange information. The proposed DEM strategy...

Batteries can effectively improve the security of energy systems and mitigate climate change by facilitating wind and solar power. The installed capacity of battery energy storage system (BESS), mainly the lithium ion batteries are increasing significantly in recent years. However, the battery degradation cannot be accurately quantified and integra...

Most power system test cases only have electrical parameters and can be used only for studies based on a snapshot of system profiles. To facilitate more comprehensive and practical studies, a synthetic power system including spatio-temporal correlated profiles for the entire year of 2019 at one-hour resolution has been created in this work. This sy...

Higher penetration of renewable and smart home technologies at the residential level challenges grid stability as utility-customer interactions add complexity to power system operations. In response, short-term residential load forecasting has become an increasing area of focus. However, forecasting at the residential level is challenging due to th...

This paper investigates how to efficiently and economically deliver offshore energy generated by offshore wind turbines to onshore. Both power cables and hydrogen energy facilities are analyzed. Each method is examined with the associated proposed optimal sizing model. A cost-benefit analysis is conducted, and these methods are compared under diffe...

Risk analysis is currently not quantified in microgrid resource scheduling optimization. This paper conducts a conditional value at risk (cVaR) analysis on a grid-disconnected residential microgrid with distributed energy resources (DER). We assume the infrastructure to set up an ad-hoc microgrid is already in place for a residential neighborhood w...

Battery energy storage system (BESS) can effectively mitigate the uncertainty of variable renewable generation. Degradation is unpreventable and hard to model and predict for batteries such as the most popular Lithium-ion battery (LiB). In this paper, we propose a data driven method to predict the battery degradation per a given scheduled battery o...

Day-ahead operation involves a complex and computationally intensive optimization process to determine the generator commitment schedule and dispatch. The optimization process is a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) also known as security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC). Independent system operators (ISOs) run SCUC daily and require state-of-th...

Security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) is a computationally complex process utilized in power system day-ahead scheduling and market clearing. SCUC is run daily and requires state-of-the-art algorithms to speed up the process. The constraints and data associated with SCUC are both geographically and temporally correlated to ensure reliability...

With the increasing penetration of converter-based renewable resources, different types of dynamics have been introduced to the power system. Due to the complexity and high order of the modern power system, mathematical model-based inertia estimation method becomes more difficult. This paper proposes two novel machine learning assisted inertia esti...

The installation capacity of energy storage system, especially the battery energy storage system (BESS), has increased significantly in recent years, which is mainly applied to mitigate the fluctuation caused by renewable energy sources (RES) due to the fast response and high round-trip energy efficiency of BESS. The main components of majority of...

There have been growing interests in integrating hydrogen storage into the power grids with high renewable penetration levels. The economic benefits and power grid reliability are both essential for the hydrogen storage integration. In this paper, an annual scheduling model (ASM) for energy hubs (EH) coupled power grids is proposed to investigate t...

Conventional synchronous generators are gradually being replaced by inverter-based resources. Such transition introduces more complicated operation conditions, and also imposes challenges for system operators on maintaining system frequency and rate-of-change-of-frequency (RoCoF) security due to reduction in system inertia. To ensure the system wid...

Electricity price forecasts have become a fundamental factor affecting the decision-making of all market participants. Extreme price volatility has forced market participants to hedge against volume risks and price movements. Hence, getting an accurate price forecast from a few hours to a few days ahead is very important and very challenging due to...

With the goal of electricity system decarbonization, conventional synchronous generators are gradually replaced by converter-interfaced renewable generations. Such transition is causing concerns over system frequency and rate-of-change-of-frequency (RoCoF) security due to significant reduction in system inertia. Existing efforts are mostly derived...

Day-ahead operations involves a complex and computationally intensive optimization process to determine the generator commitment schedule and dispatch. The optimization process is a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) also known as security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC). Independent system operators (ISOs) run SCUC daily and require state-of-t...

The total electricity consumption from offshore oil/gas platforms is around 16 TWh worldwide in 2019. The majority offshore platforms are powered by the diesel generators while the rest mainly uses gas turbines, which emits large amounts of CO2 per year. The fast development of offshore wind turbines (WT) can potentially replace traditional fossil...

This paper proposes a Networked Micro Water-Energy Nexus (NetMicroWEN) capable of co-optimizing and simultaneously supplying water and energy to local consumers in nearby communities. The system manages different water and energy inputs of different communities in a local network to cooperatively meet their demands. This paper considers a centraliz...

Battery energy storage system (BESS) can effectively mitigate the uncertainty of variable renewable generation and provide flexible ancillary services. However, degradation is a key concern for rechargeable batteries such as the most widely used Lithium-ion battery. A neural network based battery degradation (NNBD) model can accurately quantify the...

The curtailment of renewable energy is more frequently observed as the renewable penetration levels are rising rapidly in modern power systems. It is a waste of free and green renewable energy and implies current power grids are unable to accommodate more renewable sources. One major reason is that higher power transmission capacity is required for...

OPF problems are formulated and solved for power system operations, especially for determining generation dispatch points in real-time. For large and complex power system networks with large numbers of variables and constraints, finding the optimal solution for real-time OPF in a timely manner requires a massive amount of computing power. This pape...

This paper proposes a novel resilience index, a microgrid survivability rate (SR) under extreme events, and then proposes a novel Resilient Operational Planning (ROP) algorithm to maximize the proposed resilience index SR. The proposed ROP algorithm can incorporate predetermined inverter failure probabilities and generate multiple scenarios accordi...

Despite the unsettled mechanism of electricity generation from the continuous flow of liquids on a surface, the charge-discharge theory has been widely accepted for alternating current (AC) generation from a moving droplet. It has been recently extended to rationalize direct current (DC) generation across a droplet moving between two different mate...

Security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) model is used for power system day-ahead scheduling. However, current SCUC model uses a static network to deliver power and meet demand optimally. A dynamic network can provide a lower optimal cost and alleviate network congestion. However, due to the computational complexity and the lack of effective alg...

Battery energy storage system (BESS) can effectively mitigate the uncertainty of variable renewable generation. Degradation is un-preventable for batteries such as the most popular Lithium-ion battery (LiB). The main causes of LiB degradation are loss of Li-ions, loss of electrolyte, and increase of internal resistance which are hard to model and p...

With increasing installation of wind and solar generation, conventional synchronous generators in power systems are gradually displaced resulting in a significant reduction in system inertia. Maintaining system frequency and rate-of-change-of-frequency (RoCoF) within acceptable ranges becomes more critical for the stability of a power system. This...

Electricity price is a key factor affecting the decision-making for all market participants. Accurate forecasting of electricity prices is very important and is also very challenging since electricity price is highly volatile due to various factors. This paper proposes an integrated long-term recurrent convolutional network (ILRCN) model to predict...

Power flow analysis is used to evaluate the flow of electricity in the power system network. Power flow calculation is used to determine the steady-state variables of the system, such as the voltage magnitude /phase angle of each bus and the active/reactive power flow on each branch. The DC power flow model is a popular linear power flow model that...

Conventional synchronous machines are gradually replaced by converter-based renewable resources. As a result, synchronous inertia, an important time-varying quantity, has substantially more impact on modern power systems stability. The increasing integration of renewable energy resources imports different dynamics into traditional power systems; th...

Security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) which is used in the power system day-ahead generation scheduling is a mixed-integer linear programming problem that is computationally intensive. A good warm-start solution or a reduced-SCUC model can bring significant time savings. In this work, a novel approach is proposed to effectively utilize machin...

A microgrid containing multiple energy sources typically serves localized loads in a small territory such as a small community and is intended to further improve the power security and sustainability for its service area. Since water supply is also very critical, this paper proposes a day-ahead water-energy co-optimization (WECoOp) model that simul...

The flexible power consumption feature of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) such as heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems makes them attractive targets for demand response (DR). TCLs possess a brief period where their power utilization can be altered without any significant impact on customer comfort level. This indicates...

As renewable resources gradually replace conventional generation based synchronous machines, the dynamics of the modern grid changes significantly and the system synchronous inertia decreases substantially. This transformation poses severe challenges for power system stability; for instance, it may lead to larger initial rate of change of frequency...

With increasing installation of wind and solar gen-eration, conventional synchronous generators in power systems are gradually displaced resulting in a significant reduction in system inertia. Maintaining system frequency within acceptable ranges becomes more critical for the stability of a power system. In this paper, we first study the impact of...

Power system restoration can be divided into three stages: black-start, network reconfiguration, and load restoration. A skeleton-network should be restored in the second stage to prepare for the subsequent large-scale system-wide load pickup. This paper proposes a novel integrated skeleton-network reconfiguration (ISNR) model which considers both...

In recent years, there has been significant growth of distributed energy resources (DERs) penetration in the power grid. The stochastic and intermittent features of variable DERs such as roof top photovoltaic (PV) bring substantial uncertainties to the grid on the consumer end and weaken the grid reliability. In addition, the fact that numerous DER...

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and physical consequences of cyber attacks against energy management systems (EMS). Within this framework, we have designed a complete simulation platform to emulate realistic EMS operations: it includes state estimation (SE), real-time contingency analysis (RTCA), and security constrained economic disp...

Renewable energy sources (RES) has gained significant interest in recent years. However, due to favourable weather conditions, the RES is installed in remote locations with limited transmission capacity. As a result, it can lead to major curtailments of the free resource when the network is congested. Therefore, energy storage system (ESS) is consi...

This paper presents a novel approach to handle the computational complexity in security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) with corrective network reconfiguration (CNR) to harness the flexibility in transmission networks. This is achieved with consideration of scalability through decomposing the SCUC/SCUC-CNR formulation and then fast screening non...

Transmission networks consist of thousands of branches for large‐scale real power systems. They are built with a high degree of redundancy for reliability concerns. Thus, it is very likely that there exist various network topologies that can deliver continuous power supply to consumers. The optimal transmission network topology could be very differ...

Though the full AC power flow model can accurately represent the physical power system, the use of this model is limited in practice due to the computational complexity associated with its non-linear and non-convexity characteristics. For instance, the AC power flow model is not incorporated in the unit commitment model for practical power systems....

Currently, system operators implement demand response by dispatching controllable loads for economic reasons in day-ahead scheduling. Particularly, demand shifting from peak hours when the cost of electricity is higher to non-peak hours to maintain system reliability by flattening the load profile. However, the system flexibility and economic benef...

Typically, a large portion of microgrid generating capacity is from variable renewable resources that are greatly impacted by the environment and can be intermittent as well as stochastic. This would result in uncertainty of microgrid net-load, and negatively affect the grid reliability. A two-phase real-time energy management strategy for networke...

Integration of intermittent renewable energy sources in modern power systems is increasing very fast. Replacement of synchronous generators with zero-to-low variable renewables substantially decreases the system inertia. In a large system, inertia distribution may vary significantly, areas of low inertia are more susceptible to frequency deviation,...

With improvement in smart grids through two-way communication, demand response (DR) has gained significant attention due to the inherent flexibility provided by shifting non-critical loads from peak periods to off-peak periods, which can greatly improve grid reliability and reduce cost of energy. Operators utilize DR to enhance operational flexibil...

Renewable energy sources (RES) has gained a lot of interest recently. The limited transmission capacity serving RES often leads to network congestion since they are located in remote favorable locations. As a result, when poorly scheduled, the intermittent nature of RES may result in high curtailments of the free resource. Currently, grid operators...

Traditionally, power system operations use a static network to deliver power and meet demand optimally. Network topology reconfiguration through transmission switching (TS) has gained significant interest recently to reduce the operational cost of power system operations. However, implementation of TS also causes large disturbance in the network an...

Transmission networks consist of thousands of branches for large-scale real power systems. They are built with a high degree of redundancy for reliability concern. Thus, it is very likely that there exist various network topologies that can deliver continuous power supply to consumers. The optimal transmission network topology could be very differe...

Security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) model is used for day-ahead scheduling. However, current SCUC model uses a static network to deliver power and meet demand optimally. This does not fully utilize the transmission flexibility and efficiently address network congestion. A dynamic network can provide a lower optimal cost and alleviate networ...

Transmission expansion planning (TEP) is critical for the power grid to meet fast growing demand in the future. Traditional TEP model does not utilize the flexibility in the transmission network that is considered as static assets. However, as the load profile may have different seasonal patterns, the optimal network configuration could be very dif...

There has been a significant growth of variable renewable generation in the power grid today. However, the industry still uses deterministic optimization to model and solve the optimal power flow (OPF) problem for real-time generation dispatch that ignores the uncertainty associated with intermittent renewable power. Thus, it is necessary to study...

State estimation estimates the system condition in real-time and provides a base case for other energy management system (EMS) applications including real-time contingency analysis and security-constrained economic dispatch. Recent work in the literature shows malicious cyber-attack can inject false measurements that bypass traditional bad data det...

This paper presents a novel procedure for energy management system (EMS) that can utilize the flexibility in transmission network in a practical way. With the proposed enhanced EMS procedure, the reliability benefits that are provided by corrective transmission switching (CTS) in real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) can be translated into signific...

The flexibility in transmission networks is not fully utilized in existing energy management systems (EMSs). Corrective transmission switching (CTS) is proposed in this two-part paper to enable EMS to take advantage of the flexibility in transmission systems in a practical way. This paper proposes two EMS procedures: 1) Procedure-A connects real-ti...

Full AC power flow model is an accurate mathematical model for representing the physical power systems. In practice, however, the utilization of this model is limited due to the computational complexity associated with its nonlinear and nonconvexity characteristics. An alternative linearized DC power flow model is widely used in the power system op...

This paper presents a novel procedure for energy management system (EMS) that can utilize the flexibility in transmission network in a practical way. With the proposed enhanced EMS procedure, the reliability benefits that are provided by corrective transmission switching (CTS) in real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) can be translated into signific...

State estimation estimates the system condition in real-time and provides a base case for other energy management system (EMS) applications including real-time contingency analysis and security-constrained economic dispatch. Recent work in the literature shows malicious cyber-attack can inject false measurements that bypass traditional bad data det...

The flexibility in transmission networks is not fully utilized and reflected in existing energy management systems (EMSs). Corrective transmission switching (CTS) is proposed in this two-part paper to enable EMS to take advantage of the flexibility in transmission systems in a practical way. This paper proposes two EMS procedures: 1) Procedure-A co...

Transmission switching (TS) has gained significant attention recently. However, barriers still remain and must be overcome before the technology can be adopted by the industry. The state of the art challenges include AC feasibility, computational complexity, the ability to handle large-scale real power systems, and dynamic stability. This paper inv...

Despite the significant attention transmission switching (TS) has gained over the last decade, important challenges remain. This paper addresses the state-of-the-art challenges of TS by studying the benefits of corrective switching using authentic Independent System Operator of New England (ISO-NE) data and software. Thus, the results and analyses...