Panayiotis (Panos) Moutis CCNY Blog

Immediate PhD opportunity for Virtual Power Plant battery research

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:16:44 -0500

November ’25 (edited)

Sanjoy Banerjee and I are recruiting one PhD student in the framework of the Translational Research Excellence Across Disciplines (TREAD) program funded by the Dept. of Ed (EDIT: TREAD website with more details about program priorities and framework here). Our work will focus on identifying battery chemistries and plan battery deployments for cost-optimal load management of residential and small commercial US customers. We aim to improve existing programs and yield savings of at least 10% per household or business in 5 years. We will go beyond the peak shaving practices and work on the pragmatic coordination of services valuable to distribution systems via the paradigm of Virtual Power Plants.

The PhD student will join the DEgIDAL group starting in Spring or Fall 26. DEgIDAL is part of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering (EE) at the City College of the University of New York (ranked 4th behind the top world colleges in the value of the EE degree). The student will also be trained with Prof. Banerjee’s group and at the CUNY Energy Institute. The student receives at least 2-year guaranteed stipends (highest research assistant rate), and additional funding for research supplies/materials, core facilities fees and travel budget for conferences and workshops.

Successful applicants must demonstrate (via transcripts or peer-reviewed publications):

extensive energy modeling and electricity markets expertise,
strong optimization and statistical background (Bayesian statistics, cone programming, stochastic programming),
coding experience (preferably in artificial intelligence paradigms such as neural networks, decision trees, SVMs, clustering, genetic algorithms).

The opportunity is open only to US Citizens and Legal Permanent Residents (green card).

For more information and to express your interest contact me via email with your CV and subject line “(your name) – CCNY TREAD PhD opportunity”.

Press updates - Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Grid & Electricity Markets

Panayiotis Moutis — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 21:53:54 -0400

October 2025

In the past few weeks the Climate Change AI Initiative introduced me to 2 reporters for input on the matter of the recent peaking interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its effects to electrical grids and electricity markets.

Recent AI breakthroughs have meant the rampant growth of data center deployment and their load demand. For those unfamiliar with the topic, Machine Learning (ML), a branch of AI, requires training data to extract statistical mapping from certain types of input to patterns, knowledge or forecasting of trends or phenomena. At the current stage of ML development, the training data have become immense in size, hence, the meteoric increase in data centers and their electricity consumption. Even though, OpenAI, xAI and Meta blew open this Pandora’s Box in later 2022, there were signs that deep ML was leading us this was as early as 2020. I recall a panel I shared with utility C-suites saying that compared to 2-5% year-to-year throughout the 2010s, they have been updating their load growth outlooks by multiple folds in the early 2020s.

As I told Olivia Prusky from the PhillyDaily.com for her article “Is Pennsylvania ready to power the next industrial revolution with AI?“, I have not been surprised by Trump’s administration push for powering of this AI boom with fossil fuels. But I have been surprised by how Big Tech have had similar plans all along, even when they claimed otherwise (during the Biden administration). Which brings about my first concern: Big Tech buying all gas units they can get their hands on, means fewer procurement sources for utilities. In April ’25, FERC denied the Talon-Amazon agreement that would “strand” nuclear power exclusively for Amazon data center uses; granted, due to cost reasons, but the broader gist is unchanged. In a deregulated electricity market all assets should be competitively “contested”… When certain players can “hoard” all the gas generators (just because they know they will need it for their own immense load demand), we might be very well going down the road of supply shortfalls. In technical terms, brownouts and/or blackouts. A few analysts confirmed my fears just a few hours ago…

Albeit service interruptions are the improbable side-effect of the rise of AI, the climbing electricity costs are pretty much a certainty of the present reality. Throughout the northeastern US, as reported by the Washington Post, electricity bills have been increasing several units or dozens of units percent… Given this context, I was very careful when MIT Technology Review‘s Casey Crownhart‘s asked for my comments on whether AI can help the grid. When it comes to electricity prices, AI already “costs” more than it “benefits” the broader public. Wind, solar and load forecasting, expert systems, and image recognition (LiDAR-based vegetation monitoring near power lines) are not novel AI accomplishments that can justify the price tag we all have had to pay for the past few months.

Also, we have not yet seen what may happen under stressed economic conditions, a harsh winter or some widespread grid disruptions. Leading up to 2021, there were limited if no concerns at all regarding the affordability, reliability and resilience of the ERCOT grid. Come winter storm Uri, hundreds (maybe thousands?) of families were faced with massive bills due to lack of generating capacity during those cold-snap days. As the US electrical grid is not expanding at any efficient pace, new generation cannot connect in time and the existing generation is bottlenecked by grid congestions. The uphill of energy costs is only going to get steeper.

However, there is something that annoys me the most and I have not had the chance to express in either of the 2 articles that asked for my input. The US Energy Policy has been short-sighted by both the previous and the current Administrations. In my view, nothing is more indicative of failed major Energy Policy than legislating it through the budget reconciliation process. The grid does not suffer from “money” problems, but from framework problems; numerous and clunky permitting processes, legal battles, cost allocation, etc. Throwing money to favor certain technologies, analyses or roadmaps is not solving anything mentioned in the previous sentence.

I do not claim to have a solution to the market forces that are driving any liberalized sector of the economy – energy being one of them. However, FERC, NERC, EIA, the Dept. of Energy and several OUs within and beyond the cited authorities are tripping over NIMBY-isms, antiquated perspectives and slow learning curves. There are smart people, with novel ideas and bird’s eye-view of what is hurting the electricity sector. It is important to confer with these people and ask them how to best navigate the operating and economical nuances of the “largest machines in the world”. It is also important to allow/fund them to work on these problems and not put numerous obstacles in their way.

Dept. of Energy workshop at NYU & IEEE PES Grid Edge Tech's Conference

Panayiotis Moutis — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:59:06 -0500

November 2024

On December 2nd I will be heading out to the Tandon School of Engineering of NYU, invited by Yuzhang Lin to contribute to a workshop sponsored by the Solar Energy Technology Office (SETO) of the Dept. of Energy in the framework of the awarded research grant “Graph-Learning-Assisted State and Event Tracking for Solar-Penetrated Power Grids with Heterogeneous Data Sources.” My contribution will be on Optimal Power Flow (OPF) solver with Machine Learning and how to effectively approximate the OPF for distribution grids.

With the new year and on Jan. 22nd, I will be in San Diego at the IEEE PES Grid Edge Technologies Conference & Expo, joining my good friend and super bright researcher Grant Ruan, who organizes a panel on the value and use cases of Virtual Power Plants in grids of today and tomorrow.

Reach out if you are going to be on either of these two events!

NSF workshop on IBRs at MIT

Panayiotis Moutis — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:22:54 -0400

October 2024

Many thanks to Prof. Anurag Srivastava, West Virginia University, and Prof. Anuradha Annaswamy, MIT, for inviting me to their NSF-supported workshop on “Enabling Cyber-Resilient Distribution Systems with Edge Inverter-Based Resources (IBR)” at MIT, Boston, on Saturday Oct. 19th. I reviewed my work on digital twins of distribution transformers and overhead conductors and made the case for why digital twins of IBRs are becoming imminently necessary, if we wish to maintain a high level of reliability, stability and security in electrical grids with high shares of Renewable Energy.

The overall consensus of the group was that, although there are many methods, platforms and hardware to optimally and effectively control and use IBRs, there are still many open questions:

We are uncertain about the interactions among IBRs,
The standards and guidelines are not always followed by IBR owners,
We need robust IBR model validation,
The topology of distribution systems might be an additional unknown factor that affects greatly the IBR effects to the grid,
The industry is already faced with challenges in integrating and controlling large numbers of IBRs under critical conditions.

The workshop allowed me to reconnect with many great friends and colleagues. I was overjoyed to also meet with one of my students from my PhD time back in Greece, Dr. Elli Ntakou. Dr. Ntakou is now working at Eversource and presented their work on resilience under climate risks. It was fun to have us take a photo along with my PhD student Ioannis Vourkas, as a form of my academic circle from the 2010s to the 2020s, and from Greece to the USA.

Upcoming Seminars & some recent ones

Panayiotis Moutis — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 11:52:34 -0500

November 2023

With the start of the 2023-24 academic semester at my new academic home, the Dept. of EE at the CCNY of the CUNY, I had little time to announce in advance and thank the hosts for inviting me to offer talks and seminars at their institutions. That been said, I owe some gratitude and will also give some heads-up for next events that you can catch me at. Here we go!

Starting from the upcoming seminars, I am delighted beyond what words can describe to be returning to Greece and Cyprus to present my recent works at the Dept. of ECE at the University of Patras on Tuesday Jan. 9th, at the Dept. of ECE at the University of Cyprus on Friday Jan. 12th, at the Dept. of ECE at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on an. 16th and, last but not least, at my alma mater the Dept. of ECE at the National Technical University of Athens (date TBD). I want to wholeheartedly thank Professors Alexandridis, Papadaskalopoulos, Aristidou, Panteli, Papagiannis and Hatziargyriou for hosting me. I look forward to meeting with old classmates and revisiting the halls in which we worked together in the mid 2010s.

As for past events, in mid May as one of my last acts at Carnegie Mellon University, I had the distinct honor to deliver a Charge to the 2021-23 Graduates of the Energy Science, Technology & Policy MSc program. Emotions overwhelmed me and I will forever carry with me the love and trust that the Program Director Prof. Paul Salvador and the numerous MSc students put in me, and my educational and mentoring efforts. Lastly, in July, at the 2023 IEEE PES General Meeting in Orlando, I contributed to three panel sessions going over results from and aspirations for my recent and earlier works on Digital Twins for grid components, Wavelet Synopses for timeseries data, and Microgrids for exurban residential communities. Many thanks to Harry Konstantinou, Masoud Nazari and Di Shi for inviting me to these highly engaging sessions.

Joining the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at CCNY in Aug. '23

Panayiotis Moutis — Wed, 03 May 2023 09:39:52 -0400

May 2023

I am ecstatic to announce that on Aug. 1st I will be joining the Dept. of Electrical Engineering within the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY), as Assistant Professor. It is amazing to join an Institution with 175 years of history, founded as the first tuition-free college in the US (until 1976), and which still strives to provide wider access to higher education for all. Two units within CCNY have been named after notable alumni, who decisively redefined their course with their donations and leadership: the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership (after the first African American Sec. of State) and the Grove School of Engineering (after one of Intel’s founding members & CEO, Andrew Grove). At CCNY, I will establish the Digitalized Electric Grid Innovations, Developments & Applications Laboratory (DEgIDAL). DEgiDAL will focus on how data-sets of historical records and real-time synchronized measurements can inform renewable energy pricing, grid stability and protection, and equitable access to electricity of high power quality for all.

I am grateful to everyone at Carnegie Mellon University for 6 wonderful years as postdoc and special faculty, and for enabling me to take on important roles within the US energy space. My postdoc advisors Profs. Gabriela Hug and Soummya Kar trained me thoroughly in power system optimization. Prof. Jay Whitacre involved me in breakthrough research on battery storage planning. Profs. Jay Apt, Paul Salvador, Barry Rawn, Sevin Yeltekin and Willem van Hoeve inspired me and supported me in developing and teaching 5 courses, and in advising more than a dozen MSc students from the College of Engineering and the Tepper School of Business.

Undoubtedly, this immensely joyful milestone would have been impossible without the strong Electrical & Computer Engineering foundations I received at my alma mater, the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. In the form of gratitude I will refer specifically to two exquisite people that defined my path at NTUA. Firstly, my PhD+MSc advisor, the tireless and all-round power systems scholar Prof. Nikos Hatziargyriou, taught me most of what I know and was the ‘charge’ of my academic journey across the Atlantic. Secondly, Prof. Timos Sellis, a bright beacon of databases’ expertise, was the one who infused me with the passion for artificial intelligence and machine learning through data mining.

Lastly, I want to thank Drs. Giannis Bourmpakis, Kyri Baker, Constance Crozier, Jeff Wischkaemper, Mads Almassalkhi and Javad Mohammadi, and Profs. Fran Li, David Infield, Barry Rand, Luigi Vanfretti, Costa Samaras and Antonio Conejo for advising and encouraging me in the past couple of years of my faculty job search. The process was tough, sometimes dubious (if not outright scandalous in a few cases), but the support from these people kept me going!

In a few months I will be recruiting for 3 fully-funded PhD positions to join DEgIDAL. Stay tuned & reach out.

Respice. Adspice. Prospice.

IEEE Publications' roles updates Jan. '23

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 10:06:54 -0500

January 2023

Prof. Fran Li, the EiC of the IEEE Open Access Journal of Power & Energy (OAJPE), kindly informed me I have been awarded the Outstanding Associate Editor (AE) recognition for 2022. It is always exciting to realize you are doing your job well, let alone in a nascent publication with exciting trajectory, immense potential and a respectful and strong Open Access policy. I would have not received this recognition without the expert Reviewers that accept my invitations and contribute their thoughtful and in-depth comments on the manuscripts submitted to the IEEE OAJPE. To my dear Reviewers, thank you for putting up with me and taking on my assignments!

Another very exciting development is that I have been nominated by the IEEE Young Professionals (YP) for the position of the YP representative with voting rights at the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB). This is a special honor and, also, acknowledgement of all my efforts to improve and enhance the quality of scientific publications, especially in my field of power and energy systems. Beyond my own personal experience, I have been lucky that many friends and colleagues who are Authors, Reviewers and Associate Editors across multiple publications have trusted me with their concerns and ideas. I plan to make the best of this opportunity and all input I have received during my 2023 term at the PSPB, aiming for positive and valuable changes.

In the context of both these updates, please, do not hesitate to contact me with your availability to review papers in the scope of your expertise and also tell me of any concerns and ideas you got for the improvement of publications. I will treat all input as confidential and I am thankful in advance for your interest!

Panel at 2023 IEEE ISGT North America & Ask the Panelists" Contest"

Panayiotis Moutis — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 08:50:31 -0500

December 2022

With the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and similar incentivizing initiatives all over the world, the clean energy transition is – more or less (and hopefully!) – set on long-term and fast(er) tracks. In this context, the roles and impact of grid modernization, its digitalization and the broader space of (what we call) the “smart grid” become rather interesting. This is because the electricity sector has never – practically – suffered from lack of capital. So one may ask why would the recently introduced frameworks matter and justify expectations for significant changes?

With the support of the IEEE Smart Grid, I invited some good friends, colleagues and alumni of my courses at CMU for a panel at the 2023 IEEE North America Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) conference. Together we will probe the new electricity sector landscape and answer some challenging questions about how the decarbonization of this space must rely on a range of solutions, including, among many others, infrastructure planning, energy security, non-wire alternatives and policy per se. I am grateful to my panelists Clare Callahan (Deloitte & CMU alumni), Doug Houseman (Burns McDonnell), Damir Novosel (Quanta Technology) and Rob Gramlich (Grid Strategies LLC, ex-FERC, ex-PJM & others) for joining me in this 1.5 hours endeavor on Tuesday, Jan. 17th at 12:30 pm ET! Special thanks go out to Hannah Morrey Brown (Burns McDonnell) & Shay Bahramirad (Quanta Technology) whom I had initially invited as panelists, but needed to kindly defer to colleagues.

But wait… There’s more!

With the support of the Climate Change AI (CCAI) Initiative we are organizing a contest for questions for our panelists. The top-5 submitters (judged by CCAI Power & Energy Community Leads) will win complementary remote live access to the panel, during which they may ask their questions themselves! We are particularly interested in receiving questions from junior researchers and young professionals. The Contest will run until January 10th 23:59 AoE. The link to the contest is here. Best of luck to all of you!

Keynote Speech at North Jersey Research Student Conference 2022

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 08:55:05 -0500

November 2022

I am honored and humbled by my dear friend’s, Dr. Philip Pong‘s, invitation to offer the keynote speech at the 1st edition of the North Jersey Research Student Conference. The Conference will be held on December 9th at the Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I am particularly happy, as this initiative aims first and foremost to promote and encourage students’ research at all levels within the dept. of ECE at NJIT; postdocs, PhD, MSc and undergraduate students will be presenting their most recent research results in the aims of exploring collaborations and impactful outreach!

My keynote speech will be on my recent work on digital twins for near real time sensing and monitoring of – mostly – distribution grid components (transformers and overhead conductors) for security and power quality. I will also be sitting in the committee of the Awards & Certificates of Merit of the presented students’ works.

I hope and wish that more and more ECE departments will organize similar conferences to empower their students and inspire them to engage and collaborate across seniority.

Webinar on Decision Trees for AC OPF at Newcastle University Optimization Group

Panayiotis Moutis — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 22:36:04 -0400

November 2022

It is always a joy to join (albeit remotely) the co-organizer of the Newcastle University Optimization Group Webinars, my old student, the very hard-working and inspiring researcher Dr. Ilias Sarantakos. On, Nov. 21st at 14:00 15:00 (London time) I will be presenting my recently published paper at the IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution journal on the solution of the AC OPF with the machine learning tool of top-down heuristically inducted binary decision trees (hiBDT). I strongly urge you to register and follow the Group’s webinar series here. They also neatly keep recordings of the webinars they have previously organized here; great resource and a nice overview of recent developments in the space.

I will be discussing the theoretical guarantees (and some apparent implications) of a feasible space search with hiBDT recursively tightening the bounds/intervals of control variables towards a global optimum. The IEEE PES Task Force’s Power Grid library will be briefly presented as a crucial benchmark in assessing AC OPF solvers, relaxations, etc. The efficiency of the proposed hiBDT method will be posed as an open issue requiring considerations of “hot starting” and how to effectively search the AC OPF feasible space. Lastly, the recursive variable bound tightening with hiBDT that progressively improves the dispatch cost will be discussed as a feature of the method to robustly price the commitment of renewables unaffected by their volatility.

IET GTD Paper on Solving the AC Optimal Power Flow with Machine Learning

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 17:34:00 -0400

October 2022

I am elated to report the acceptance of my recent work at the IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution (GTD) open access (OA) journal of the Wiley publications! Before unpacking my paper with the (kind of long) title “Stochasticity Agnostic Solution to the AC Optimal Power Flow by Recursive Bound Tightening with Top-Down Heuristically Inducted Binary Decision Trees” (link here), let me rejoice in the fact that the IET GTD is, according to Scholar Google, the highest ranking Q1 (in Control & Systems Eng., Electrical & Electronic Eng., Energy Eng. & Power Technology) OA journal on Power Engineering. I have been an avid proponent of OA and Associate and Senior Editor in 2 such publications. Going through the process as an Author myself has reassured me that my heart is in the right place with OA! Read more about my position on OA here.

The AC Optimal Power Flow (OPF) is a non-convex optimization problem for resources or performance metrics within an electrical grid (see formulation above). The non-convexity of the AC OPF is due to the grid physics of power flows that introduce a non-convex equality constraint to the optimization formulation. Since the AC OPF per se is – almost – never the end-problem we wish to solve, the sizes of problems encapsulating AC OPF are typically orders of magnitude larger than that and may include additional non-convexities, e.g. integer variables. The most typical approach used by several researchers in the recent years is the convex relaxation of the AC OPF to a larger dimension and – provided some conditions are met – projection of the relaxed solution back to the feasible space of the original AC OPF problem. Much fewer approaches have considered machine learning for solving the AC OPF and even fewer of those come with guarantees of global optimality. The overall framework here described clearly means that the AC OPF cannot be solved in times that make sense for system operators and other electricity stakeholders when making decisions about how to operate and plan the electrical grid functions.

My paper introduces 2 perspectives to solving the AC OPF per se and another 1 in accounting for volatile resources, such as renewables like wind generators and photovoltaics. But first of all, let me describe in a few words how the solver works (assuming we wish to minimize an objective function of energy cost). It starts by sampling the whole feasible space of the AC OPF instance. The samples are, essentially, random feasible dispatches for said problem. Then the method labels half of the samples as False, if the objective function is greater than the median cost of the samples, and True otherwise. Then a heuristically inducted binary decision tree (BDT) is trained with these samples and tightens/shrinks the feasible space (clearly towards the region of the feasible space with costs below the noted median). The method is recursively employed until the feasible space has tightened/shrunk around the global optimum (see “tightening” steps (a)-(e) in the the graph above).

Solving the AC OPF – Point 1
I prove that the method converges to the global optimum via Bayesian inference. Most typically, AC OPF solvers (and relaxations building upon them) pursue to solve the dual problem, relying on strong duality conditions that indicate that the solution of the primal and the dual problems are the same. I take a different path… I prove that a Bayes classifier for the global minimum in a small vicinity around it exists. This is true, due to the fact that the feasible space has non-random characteristics and I also explicitly label the global optimum (and some epsilon around it) as such, while the rest of the said vicinity as non-globally-optimum. From that point, iteratively, I can expand to the whole feasible space by properly labeling/splitting the vicinities of the feasible space as optimal/sub-optimal.

The existence of these Bayes classifiers means also the existence of the heuristically inducted top-down binary decision trees (BDTs) for the same classifications of optima/non-optima. The second part of the proof here could not have been possible if it had not been for Guy Blanc‘s, Jane Lange‘s & Li-Yang Tan‘s recent work on heuristically inducted BDTs. In 2020, Guy et al proved that if there exists a minimum (in the sense BDT-size; nothing to do with the underlying optimization problem here) classifier for a given function, then there exists a non-optimally-sized BDT for that same function. I am pointing this out, because the first time I have used a draft/reduced version of this method (back in 2010), I could not explain why/how the BDT would consistently converge to an optimum… Well, now I know – thanks Guy, Jane and Li-Yang!

Solving the AC OPF – Point 2
Even though it kind of stems from Point 1, it is a remark that I wish to separately mention here. The steps of tightening the AC OPF feasible space towards the global optimum seem unaffected by the size of the grid, but follow the number of the decision variables. In the way I have structured the solver, the decision variables are the active and reactive power set-points of the generating resources. This can be particularly valuable when larger grids with fewer resources must be optimized. Given how typical solvers descend along gradients of a feasible space, the size of the latter will affect that descent. Hence, larger grids, meaning greater numbers of voltage angles, magnitudes and flows, will be slowing down the solving descent. In the AC OPF solution I propose, the size of the grid does not matter, provided that the BDT training samples are feasible and adequate. This is particularly interesting, because we can consider how to accelerate this solution via the control intervals of generators, which are typically not continuous and cannot take any value between minimum and maximum (looking for the exact NERC rule and I will cite it here).

Effect of Volatile Resources in Solving the AC OPF
Typically, renewable energy has negligible, if not zero, operating costs, hence, gets dispatched by priority in any electricity market. However, the exact amount of available renewable energy is usually impossible to determine ahead of time and only offered within some forecasted confidence intervals (see forecasting figure below). This means that as the proposed AC OPF solver converges to the global optimum by the successive median cost of the sampled feasible space, the commitment of renewable energy within the AC OPF increases towards the global optimum at a decreasing confidence. In other words, renewable energy will be committed within the AC OPF at lower set-points corresponding to higher forecasting confidence in the first few iterations of the method (higher objective function costs) and at higher set-points of limited confidence when the process converges to global minimum.

As in my last paper, I had the joy to work with another CMU MSc student, who put in some coding work for me; Parth joined me along for the ride on the paper authorship, too! It was fun and very rewarding to substantially advance my past work on machine-learning-driven optimization of electrical grids with volatile renewables, gain better understanding of the methodology and its characteristics, test it rigorously for performance and get it published OA. Next steps are determining appropriate BDT training sizes and focusing on the stochasticity aspect of this AC OPF solver. Feel free to reach out for any ideas for extensions or collaborations; I will be glad to see more applications of this tool!

How I teach Power Engineering

Panayiotis Moutis — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:12:15 -0400

September 2022

Past student (Nick Alexander) presenting his project in one of my courses (2019).

My first contribution to teaching was back in 2008 as an assistant to Prof. Korres and on the graduate-level subject on machine learning (ML) applications within power system control centers. The subject was more of a review on research ideas and publications exploring if and how ML could be useful in real-time operation of electrical grids, as also the planning of their infrastructure. As a junior PhD student under Prof. Hatziargyriou at that time I was just then dipping my toes in the vast sea of research on artificial intelligence (AI) in power systems. Helping teach that course offered some valuable insights.

Graph from this Verge article: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18136929/artificial-intelligence-ai…

In those years, ML and AI were very appealing in the mainstream engineering education and research (buildings, components, power systems, circuits, etc), but were themselves going through some introspection within the computer science community. There are several articles pointing out to the relative plateauing of R&D on AI & ML in the later 2005-10 period, followed by exponential growth afterwards. Nevertheless, more traditional engineering fields were warming up to their “digitalization” and reinventing themselves as smart: smart grids, smart buildings, smart materials and so on. Even though this latter push was strong within research circles and several professional initiatives started popping up, in practice, AI & ML applications were taking baby-steps. The tide changed after bold start-ups adopted their value en masse in the mid 2010s.

Looking back to the period of 2005-10 through the lens of the technology shifts of the later years, made me realize something ‘big’ about higher education teaching. We do not teach to only educate or provide necessary skill-sets; we teach to seed a vision. And I am very cautious with my words here. I do not proclaim that university teaching must be ‘persistently’ forward-thinking. I do not imply that the fundamentals should be in any way glossed over. I do not believe that there is such a thing as either redundant or rudimentary knowledge. What I am saying though is that higher-ed teachers have a unique challenge: we must read the tea leaves or crystal balls of our “craft” and prepare students of what is to come, even though no one else might be seeing this yet.

Image taken from GSMArena article https://www.gsmarena.com/asymco_pricing_doesnt_affect_smartphone_adopti…

Think about the example of the course I mentioned earlier and the ‘smartening up’ of many economy sectors. The actual computer science field was kind of taking a breather on AI and ML at that time, yet all other engineering fields were bracing confidently about a tech boom relying exactly on AI and ML! If we seek to dissect this paradox a bit, we will see that there were – actually – no tea leaves or crystal balls necessary. Computers and mobile devices were becoming widely available and used a ton by consumers, practically giving educators the low-hanging fruit of inspiration about advanced computing tools.

Image taken from this Economist article https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/01/16/china-powers-ahead-…

Fast forward to 2018, when I developed, proposed to CMU and started teaching a course, then titled, “Optimization Modeling in Power Systems”. I was reading my “crystal ball” and realizing that the ever present discussion about the failing and ageing grids (first pointed out in the 1990s) was actually spilling dangerously into reality. Add another 3-4 years to that and here we are in 2021 and 2022 witnessing the passing of multi-billion dollar bills that will expand the US electrical grid, several start-ups monetize efficiency for end-customers globally, while China has already taken strides ahead in its high-voltage transmission system backbone. Optimizing all electrical grid operations and planning, which used to be the expertise of engineers with PhDs, is now expected by the MSc graduates of energy engineering programs. My personal story here is that in 2018 and the next couple of years, the “Optimization Modeling in Power Systems” course was attended by barely 5 students – mostly in their PhDs; now I teach a roster of 16 students – more than half of whom are MSc students.

What I mean to point out with the above story is that power and energy engineering education is not straight-forward, since it links to multiple other subjects and fields. I am sad to attest to statements of scholars I admire saying that “power engineering is not science”. And yet here we are, following a “hunker down pandemic” (which should have reduced energy demand) and a 6-month localized war (which should have not hurt international energy security), which are crippling multiple economies by threatening electricity markets everywhere. Even more ironically, most of these electricity markets could have already had energy independence, had they built out their grids and/or made them much more efficient. Put simply, energy and power educators have to look deep and wide in their research and expertise, and aspire to new subjects and angles (decentralized? autonomous? self-sufficient? resilient?). The energy and power work force is crumbling, several places around the world are still not electrified consistently (let alone have energy security), and energy dependencies are heavy and stretch the globe.

I conclude this blog with a final thought. The energy sector comprises entities and processes that are complex, large and slow to adapt, while the challenges they are faced with and the tools to address them are fast and with much impact. This means that the teaching aspirations of power and energy engineering faculty must be also realistic and delivered with confidence and persistence. As instructors in this field, we must develop the necessary intuition and retain adequate humility in keeping our ear to the ground for the right signs of change. And this last thing is not easy; personally, I have acquired these “skills” with years of practicing engineering and humbling disappointment across several projects I have worked on. Others before and around me are trying through broad involvement in committees, initiatives and working groups. Whatever the way, educating the next generations of power and energy engineers is an urgent duty hanging already over our heads, especially, if we wish to be honest to our vision for the clean energy transition.

Power & Energy Community Co-Lead at the CCAI

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 10:40:01 -0400

Aug. 2022

It gives me immense joy to announce that I have joined the core team of the Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization. I will be serving the role of Power & Energy Community Co-Lead, alongside the tireless, devoted and unimaginably energetic CCAI’s co-founder, Dr. Priya Donti,

CCAI has identified climate change as the humankind’s most imminent existential threat, affecting primarily those who are underprivileged – communities of color, impoverished, without access to advanced technology and modern infrastructure. Within CCAI it is also understood that the climate change is a multi-faceted problem, at varying scales and with unique nuances across different sectors. In this sense, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the computational tools, approaches and frameworks it brings to the table represent the means to implement the coordinated and demanding efforts required to address this threat. However, with AI’s meteoric rise, its adverse impacts come also into scope within a world that attempts strides towards a fairer, more inclusive and more equitable environment and society. CCAI seeks to be the organization that brings together researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, policy and decision makers, and all stakeholders from the public and private sectors to promptly and consistently create the community, educate the society, inform the infrastructure planning and serve as the global forum that will put AI to the service of climate change mitigation for the sake of each and every life on the planet.

My first couple of weeks within CCAI have been absolutely amazing. The organization has shown immense attention to detail, there are multiple outcomes of hard and coordinated work, the processes are defined clearly and the roles are crisp. Having being part of many volunteer and non-profit organizations for the past 15 years of my work on renewable energy research, CCAI is among the very few that have been so meticulously designed and operated. Combining this with the CCAI’s community’s passion for the cause, the members’ unwavering work ethic since the organization was first rolled out in 2019 and all the plans already in motion across multiple venues, I am certain that CCAI heads out to build and inspire many great accomplishments in this space! If you are reading these lines, you should definitely reach out and engage with the CCAI.

I want to thank from the bottom of my heart Dr. Priya Donti, Marcus Voss, Raphaela Kotsch, Dr. Kasia Tokarska, Dr. Evan Sherwin and the many other CCAI team members for the warm welcome. Let’s do this!

Inertia Emulation & Frequency Control at the UNIFI Fall 2022 Seminar Series

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 09:31:39 -0400

August 2022

I am sincerely grateful to the many wonderful colleagues at the UNIFI consortium for having me present my older work on methods to emulate inertia and perform frequency control with wind and photovoltaic generators. My seminar is scheduled on Monday Sep. 19th at 4 pm ET, as part of the Fall 2022 Seminar Series (more information here).

The UNIFI project aims to conduct advanced research, design testing and develop standards on grid-forming inverters. Inverters are the power electronics devices that enable the efficient connection of many renewables to the electrical grids. With the gradual replacement of conventional units by renewables, the roles of the former pass on to the latter. “Grid-forming” is the functionality necessary to establish and maintain a standardized three-phase alternating current that serves some load demand. Inverters have been typically able to perform “grid-forming” at limited off-grid scales, but are now expected to expand it at the level of large interconnected grids.

Typical stages of Load-Frequency Control (LFC) in power systems

In my seminar I will focus mostly on the side of the sources, specifically wind and photovoltaic energy. Traditionally, these generators have been operated on strategies of maximum power absorption. Even though these strategies optimize the use of renewable sources, they are inflexible when load demand varies or the generation from other resources fluctuates. In fact, due to electricity physics any generation-demand imbalance, reflects to changes in the electrical frequency of the alternating currents; this change of frequency can control generators to respond to the load-generation imbalances. With wind and photovoltaic generators at maximum power absorption, responding to frequency signals that requires them to contribute additional power is impossible; hence, the requirement to procure reserves arises. I will review the methods, challenges, some results of real-world testing and expand on how grid-forming functionalities might be affected by inertia emulation and frequency control by wind and photovoltaic units.

Special Issue at the Intl. Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems

Panayiotis Moutis — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 22:24:45 -0400

June 2022

I am kindly inviting you all to submit your works to the Special Issue on “Novel Protection and Control Methodologies towards Electrical Grids with Net-Zero Carbon Emissions” at the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems of the Elsevier publications. Here is the link to the call for papers. You may submit your novel contributions (full manuscripts) starting July 1st and by 30 Sep, 2022, on any of the following subjects:

Online/real-time monitoring and situational awareness solutions (detection and location of system oscillation, fault level monitoring and quantification, inertia measurement, etc.),
Analyzing and characterizing fault behavior and the novel protection strategies and solutions,
Converter control-based solutions to support protection operation,
Electrical grid design and assessment for robust point of common coupling impedance behavior,
New coordinating control solutions,
Methods for assessment of resilience,
New protection and control solutions during extreme weather/operating conditions and
New ICT technologies for protection.

I am grateful to my friend Dr. Qiteng Hong (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow), as also, Dr. Botong Li (Tianjin University), who are the Guest EiCs of this special issue and kindly invited me to serve with them on the editorial board. You may contact me for any additional details for works you would like to submit.

Power & Energy Vertical Track at the 2022 IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 17 May 2022 10:09:57 -0400

May 2022

I am sincerely excited to co-chair the Power & Energy Vertical Track at the 2022 IEEE World Forum on Internet-of-Things (WF IoT), in Yokohama, Japan, coming November. I have happily chaired the same track in the last installment of the WF and I look forward to putting together multiple sessions of researchers and experts on all things (“Internet of… things” – see what I did there?) energy and power systems.

My track co-chair SÃ©rgio Ivan Lopes, Technology and Management School of the Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo (ESTG-IPVC), and I will be reaching out to many of you who can contribute to the subjects of interest. The contributions may also be remote/online. A paper track is planned, too, and I will be updating this announcement with submission and deadline details soon.

If you want to nominate yourself or someone you know as a contributor to the Energy & Power Vertical Track of the 2022 IEEE WF on IoT, please reach out. I will be delighted to have you!

Appointed co-lead of NASPI Distribution Task Team

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 03 May 2022 09:01:13 -0400

May 2022

I am particularly happy and honored to join Daniel Dietmeyer from San Diego Gas & Electric in leading the Distribution Task Team (DisTT) at the North American Synchro Phasor Initiative (NASPI).

NASPI was founded in 2003 as the Eastern Interconnection Phasor Project, it is funded by the US Dept. of Energy, and is supported by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). It is the largest collaboration of academics, industry practitioners and standardizing bodies for the development, use, understanding and promotion of methods and technologies based on synchronized measurements of voltage and current waveforms in power systems. These measurements with granularity of at least 30 per second and which are time synchronized via satellite across large grids, allow us to better analyze and control the stability and the security of the electrical grid.

Within the framework of DisTT, synchronized measurements enable the detection of faults, increase of hosting capacity of renewables, monitoring equipment health and others functions. At the current stage, DisTT focuses on the medium voltage beyond the substation.

This great opportunity and responsibility could not have been possible without the mentorship, support and inspiration that Sascha von Meier from UC Berkeley has gracefully offered me. I take over her role in leading DisTT in the hopes I can achieve half of what she did! Also, many thanks to Jeff Dagle (PNNL and chair of NASPI) for welcoming me on board.

Appointed Special Issues Editor at the IET RPG

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 09:52:43 -0400

March 2022

I am thrilled to announce that the Editors in Chief of the IET Renewable Power Generation (RPG) journal, Prof. Infield and Prof. Tricoli, have invited me to serve as the inaugural Special Issues Editor for this publication. I assume this role immediately and further to those of the Regional Editor for North America and Associate Editor on the subject of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems for the same Open Access (OA) journal. It is particularly indicative of the Institute’s priorities that this is only the second IET publication in the field of energy and electrical power systems that is assigned with a Special Issues Editor.

Since the decarbonization of the energy sector is an aim long-overdue and particularly complicated, it requires the mobilization of several stakeholders in the academia, the industry and among the decision and policy makers. The role and the positioning of the IET RPG in this discussion is central in bringing stakeholders together as authors, reviewers and adopters of publications disseminating how renewable energy at the microscopic and macroscopic levels can fulfill the clean energy transition.

In my role as Special Issues Editor, I will be soliciting, organizing, overseeing, editing and managing thematic calls for papers at the intersection as also the periphery of IET RPG topics, supporting their Guest Editors and attracting prospective Authors. For those of you who know me, understand that my involvement will be hands-on, the Special Issues will be appropriately curated, and that the Guest Editors will have the full support of the RPG journal staff and the IET organization. I urge you to contact me with ideas and proposals, even though I will also be reaching out to many of you.

As I have stated previously, OA to the concepts and results of academic and industrial R&D is the corner-stone of promoting and disseminating crucial ideas and important scientific results in the times of urgent calls to action. In my view, the OA publications by the IEEE and the IET have been serving this mission with respect to the Authors and their work at the highest level of quality and with a dedicated pursuit for academic excellence. I am very proud to serve publications for both the IEEE and the IET!

IEEE TPWRS Paper on Digital Twin of Overhead Lines for Fire Detection

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:27:29 -0400

March 2022

Extending some of my previous work, I developed a digital twin for overhead conductors that detects an approaching forest fire and de-energizes the affected lines in a timely manner and not preemptively. The work has just been accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (preprint here).

In California (CA) and elsewhere, the risk of overhead conductors igniting forest fires or adding seats to on-going ones is very real and extensive. In CA, PG&E’s overhead conductor equipment was determined to be the reason for the 2018 Camp fire, leading to law suits that caused the utility’s bankruptcy. After restructuring, the company updated its practices with preemptive disconnections of large parts of its grid during days of high risk of fire. The new practice disrupted service to thousands of customers, in most cases unnecessarily. Hundreds of new suits threatened PG&E with a second bankruptcy in 3 years.

Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) have been widely adopted across grids. PMUs may be installed along a line in distances as close as a 1-2 miles in between. This gives rise and basis to the idea of real-time monitoring of line impedance for any reasons of variation. As resistance increases with ambient temperature (not proportionally), steep decreases in the inductance/resistance ratio (tangent of the impedance phasor – tanÎ´ in the figure) of an overhead conductor may indicate that a forest fire burns near said conductor and it should, thus, be disconnected.

Behavior of moving average of impedance phasor as a forest fire approaches an overhead conductor and affects its resistance. Such a behavior should control the disconnection of this conductor.

The in silico testing under numerous worst case scenario conditions (no solar heating effect, broad measurement error intervals, synchronization errors, etc.), showed that the proposed method detects some cases of a forest fire approaching a conductor, in sub-second times and at extremely low false positive rates. In the next steps, I plan a collaboration with interested utilities and the US Forest Service for field testing.

I want to thank CMU ECE’s MSc student (at that time) and co-author Uday Sriram for his help in setting up the tests, Dan Dietmeyer from SDG&E for informing me about PMU deployments in CA, Farnoosh Rahmatian from NuGrid Power for lending his expertise on instrument transformers and Jeff Dagle from PNNL for his crucial comments in the earlier stages of this work.

Panel on Synchrophasors in Zero Inertia Grids at the IEEE SGSMA 2022

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 10:11:19 -0500

February 2022

I am grateful to the Technical Program chairs of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Synchronized Measurements and Analytics (SGSMA 2022) for accepting our panel proposal titled “Towards a Zero Inertia Grid thanks to Synchrophasor Measurements”. I have been delighted to have Prof. Yilu Liu (University of Tennessee at Knoxville), Dr. Evangelos Farantatos (EPRI), Dr. Deepak Ramasubramanian (EPRI, on behalf of UNIFI), Dr. Qiteng Hong (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow) and Dr. Krish Narendra (Electric Power Group) accept my invitations to join this panel and contribute their expertise and experiences on the matter.

What we will be talking about revolves around how the electrical grid shifting to renewables and batteries, entails the shift to resources interfacing with the power system via power electronics – inverter, rectifiers and converters. As these devices and the sources they interface are characterized by fast dynamics, the traditional control paradigm followed to the day cannot suffice. The reason is that the phenomena that used to span seconds (thanks to large rotating inertias of conventional generators), will now be unfolding in milliseconds. Hence, the operators’ response times in the control rooms will be very limited. Thankfully, synchrophasors and the applications they enable can match these time-frames and allow for the transition to a new control paradigm.

I look forward to the conference and hope to be attending it in person in the beautiful town of Split in Croatia.

Digital Twins of Electrical Grid Assets

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:54:03 -0500

January 2022

A few months ago, my work with Omid Mousavi from DEPsys SA on the Digital Twin of the Medium Voltage side of a Distribution Transformer based on Low Voltage side measurements was published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery (preprint). I have been getting numerous hits on that paper plus some invitations for collaboration, so I thought I should blog a few thoughts about the subject a bit more broadly.

Let me start by describing the idea of this specific publication first. We want to monitor harmonics and system faults with adequate accuracy and, preferably, in real time throughout an electrical grid. However, medium and high voltage measurement equipment is costly and might require network disruptions to be installed. Using measurements on the lower voltage side of transformers (T/F) – LV for distribution T/F and MV for substation T/F – and relying on a model of its operation can answer both challenges, while serving the monitoring purposes. As you may read in the paper, the MV side behavior of a distribution T/F may be captured through LV measurements with the delay of a mere sample step (e.g. 0.2 ms at 5 kHz rate). Talk about real-time, right?

The bigger picture is that digital twins are purpose-driven. We define the needs of monitoring a phenomenon or range thereof, any challenges in the process, and engineer the infrastructure and the models required in that framework. The essence of digital twins lies in their ability to respond to real-time inputs and adjust the depiction of the asset or phenomenon in real-time, too. Some might say that they resemble a feedback control system, but for the purpose of monitoring.

The term “real-time” here though, is tricky. If the scope of the monitoring is electrical phenomena (e.g. transient faults), then the term implies sub-second detail. On the other hand, if the purpose is equipment ageing, then granularity of months might suffice. That been said, it is the subtext of real-time which is actually more important. The user or control process relying on the digital twin must be informed in-time to act upon the information. In the case of a T/F suffering an uncleared single phase fault to ground, there is a system operator or local utility that must respond and restore full operational capacity after the fault has occurred, yet fast enough. If the insulation of a breaker is nearing its replacement time, a few days (at least) of advance notice are necessary to plan maintenance actions.

At the moment, I am considering another digital twin for overhead transmission lines that are approached by a forest fire and must get disconnected in time. Unlike, the distribution T/F digital twin, the electrical model was not sufficient for the purpose and needed to be enhanced with additional details that made it ever more challenging and interesting. Still it seems to be able to detect the forest fire in sub-second times, thus meeting the monitoring purpose. I hope to be telling you more about it soon.

Seminar at Bits & Watts (Stanford) on Machine Learning & AI for Power Systems

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 09:57:45 -0500

January 2022

I am very excited with Dr. Liang Min‘s invitation to present my Smart Grid works on power system control with machine learning and artificial intelligence in the framework of the Bits & Watts Initiative at Stanford! The seminar will take place on Feb. 24th and I will go over the use of top-down heuristically inducted binary decision trees to procure firm capacity by renewables with volatility, and on how voltage control can be modeled as a problem of classical mechanics physics. I look forward to hearing attendees’ ideas and thoughts on other machine learning and AI applications in power system optimization, planning and control.

The seminar will be in-person, so if you are faculty, student & researcher at Stanford and would like us to meet before/after the seminar, please, do not hesitate to reach out!

Seminar at Texas A&M on Active Distribution Grids

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 06:05:04 -0500

December 2021

On Friday January 28th, 2022 I will be heading out to Texas A&M to offer a seminar to the Power & Energy Group at the Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering. I want to thank Prof. Mladen Kezunovic for the kind invitation and Dr. Birchfield for organizing the seminar. I am excited to talk about how smart grid control and digital twins can enable distribution systems to host greater capacities of renewables, while improving customers’ service by reducing interruption times.

If you are going to be attending or are in the area and want us to talk, reach out to arrange some meeting on that day/afternoon.

R&D Collaboration with X the Moonshot Factory of Google

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 08:40:31 -0500

November 2021

It might have started more than a year ago, but I have still not found the words to describe my immense excitement and my unwavering enthusiasm for my research collaboration with X, the moonshot factory of Google! Last April, Astro Teller (X’s Captain of Moonshots) and Audrey Zibelman (X’s VP & previously AEMO‘s CEO), blogged here and here, respectively, about why the decarbonization of the electrical grid needs a moonshot. By developing the digital twin of the grid, the Tapestry moonshot aims to enable power system monitoring at unprecedented granularity and unlock control response to sub-second electrical phenomena. As slower conventional units are gradually displaced by fast acting renewables and storage systems, the Tapestry vision is exactly where the electrical grid is heading…

I have been involved in the efforts for the design of the digital twin of the grid (my previous work here) as also how that can feed into robust, fast and efficient control of the power system and its assets (past works here & here). In this tremendous journey, I have been working and getting to meet with really smart people at X; great electrical grid thinkers, tremendous power electronics engineers and extremely skilled and resourceful software engineers. I have to thank the CMU Office of Sponsored Research and the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation for supporting me in every step of the way in this collaboration!

Stay tuned for upcoming updates on my efforts with X!

Seminar at Princeton on Linear Approximations to the Optimal Power Flow

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 08:01:58 -0500

November 2021

On Thursday November 4th I had the immense honor to present one of my works at the department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. Ronnie Sircar kindly invited me and I thank him deeply for that! The presentation was on one of my latest research studies about the linear approximations to the AC Optimal Power Flow and on a method to determine which approximations best fit across a given grid and a loading profile.

During my visit I had the opportunity to make new friends from multiple departments and I want to thank everyone at Princeton for their kindness and hospitality!

Seminar at NYU on Active Distribution Grids

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 10:06:33 -0400

October 2021

I am very grateful to Dr. Yury Dvorkin for honoring me with an invitation to offer an ECE seminar at the Tandon School of Engineering at NYU coming Thursday Oct. 28th! I will talk about how our interest in distribution systems has been revived and, especially, in the challenges these networks face on a daily basis. I will point out the deep-rooted technical issues that remain unresolved when operating a distribution grid and the problematic incentives that have failed to make all end-customers more active within them. The digital twin of distribution transformers for detecting grid faults and the value proposition of hybrid photovoltaic-battery systems behind the meter of residential end-customers are two of the proposals I will discuss to address the aforementioned concerns.

The seminar will be held remotely, but if you are NYU faculty, researcher or student, feel free to reach out to arrange some online meeting on that day/afternoon.

Call for Papers at CPE-POWERENG 2022, Deadline Extended to April 11th

Panayiotis Moutis — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 10:08:15 -0400

Last updated March 2022 (originally published October 2021)

Update: The submissions deadline to the 16th IEEE International Conference on Compatibility, Power Electronics and Power Engineering (CPE-POWERENG 2022) has been extended April 11th. To submit your work follow the link found here. You can read more details about topics of interest as also about the timeliness of the subjects of the conference in the following lines.

~*~

This is an important opportunity for Submitting Papers at the 16th IEEE International Conference on Compatibility, Power Electronics and Power Engineering 2022 (IEEE CPE-POWERENG 2022), which will be held in Birmingham June 29th to July 1st, 2022. CPE-POWERENG 2022 is sponsored by the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. In my role as Special Sessions Chair and given the recent surge in research and funding on the subject of low inertia grids, grids with high penetrations of inverter-interfaced resources and the efforts of the IEEE and other engineering institutions in establishing standards for such resources, we established 2 Special Sessions “Future-proof power electronic systems and control for residential microgrids” and “Advances in High Switching Frequency Power Converters for E-Mobility” (read more about them here). The conference website is now open at this link and the call for papers may be found here. We are expecting submissions on:

Power generation, transmission and distribution
Power electronics and applications
Smart grids technologies and applications
Renewable energies
Energy storage technologies
Distributed power generation systems communication, security and smart metering
Electrical machines and adjustable speed drives
Transport electrification
Electric mobility
Energy market
EMI and EMC issue

Many thanks to Dr. Pietro Tricoli at the University of Birmingham for honoring me with the role of the Special Sessions chair at this conference. Previous IEEE CPE-POWERENG events took place in 2021, 2020 and 2019.

Seminar at Yale on Inverter Control for Grids Rich in Renewables

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 09:53:21 -0400

October 2021

I am extremely lucky to have recently met and exchanged ideas and research aspirations with Prof. Leandros Tassiulas, chair of Electrical Engineering (EE) at Yale. He has honored me with an invitation to offer a seminar to the Dept. of EE and the Institute for Network Science at Yale on October 13th. I will be presenting 2 of my earlier research works on control methods to procure active power reserves from wind generators and string photovoltaic inverters. Even though these technologies typically pursue maximum use of their aerodynamic and solar potential, respectively, they must also be able to support system stability. This becomes even more critical as renewable resources slowly dominate the grid and displace conventional resources that have until recently ensured stability. I will extend my previous results into the most recent research aspirations for a grid dominated by inverter-interfaced renewables and batteries and how such aspirations may be made possible.

The seminar will be virtual, but I will make myself available to all faculty, students & researchers at Yale, who would like us to talk before/after the seminar, so, please, do not hesitate to reach out!

Seminar at Stevens Institute of Technology on Improving Distribution System Operation

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 08:30:55 -0400

September 2021

I am humbled by Prof. Wu‘s invitation to offer a Research Seminar at the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology on November 17th. I will be discussing the criticalities in the operation, maintenance and development of the distribution systems in electrical grids. Even though widespread black-outs are infrequent, customers in the US and elsewhere still suffer service interruptions that add up to many hours per year. The reasons lie in the poor monitoring of the distribution system, the limited use cases for distributed generation and storage in practice, and the lack of any resilience proposition. I will go over some of my recent and past works on the digital twin of distribution transformers, improving voltage profiles along feeders and actively controlling behind-the-meter photovoltaics and batteries of residential customers for improving energy costs and reducing line congestion.

The seminar will be held remotely, but I will be delighted to meet virtually with any student, researcher or faculty at Stevens for a one-on-one before or after the seminar. Feel free to reach out to arrange it!

Seminar at RPI on Power System Control with Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

Panayiotis Moutis — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 09:26:09 -0400

August 2021

I want to thank Prof. Mona Mostafa Hella and Dr. Luigi Vanfretti, my friend and collaborator at the North American Synchrophasor Initiative (NASPI), for inviting me to offer a seminar at the Dept. of Electrical, Computer & Systems Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on September 29th. I will review 2 of my works on generation control with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). I will start by discussing how to use top-down heuristically inducted binary decision trees of ML to actively control firm capacity by volatile resources operated (among others units) as a Virtual Power Plant. In the second part, I will present how voltage control can be modeled as a problem of classical mechanics physics; from there it can be solved as an AI implementation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics to redispatch active and reactive power generation. I plan to spark a discussion on conceiving new ML applications and AI models for power system operational control and monitoring.

The seminar will be virtual, but I will make myself available to all faculty, students & researchers of RPI, who would like us to talk before/after the seminar, so, please, do not hesitate to reach out!

Seminar at Ohio State University on residential PV & batteries

Panayiotis Moutis — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 10:49:01 -0400

August 2021

I am grateful to my friend and collaborator at the IET Renewable Power Generation journal, Prof. Ramteen Sioshansi for kindly inviting me to offer a seminar at the Dept. of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State University on November 10. I will talk about my earlier work at CMU on the Dept. of Energy SHINES project, on how batteries can allow residential end-customers to widely benefit from behind-the-meter photovoltaics. Reducing the costly effects of demand charges promises additional value to that of net-metering or self-consumption from photovoltaics, while the policy implications offer much food for thought on the role of utilities, cooperatives and/or microgrids.

Depending on the situation with COVID the seminar might be in-person, so follow me on Twitter & LinkedIn for updates.

11th IET International Renewable Power Generation Conference, 2022

Panayiotis Moutis — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 11:23:02 -0400

Last Updated December 2021 (originally published August 2021)

Call for Papers (deadline Jan. 28t, 2022) – 2022 IET RPG Conference, London, UK

Initiatives, policy proposals, legislation and cheap capital have been defining the framework of a broad and accelerating shift towards cleaner infrastructure and processes in all sectors and aspects of society. The race to zero carbon emissions is on and organizations and consortia all around the world are bringing together experts, scholars, thought leaders and industry stakeholders to exchange views and inform each other about the what, how and when of new methods, new materials and new ideas. For the electricity sector, the shift to a future of generating fleets comprising almost exclusively of renewable energy sources (RES) is undoubted and brings about engineering challenges and policy hurdles.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has one of the longest living journals about RES, titled Renewable Power Generation (RPG), first indexed in 2007. IET also holds a similarly named and themed conference. In its 11th instalment, the IET RPG conference seeks to answer the call to meet Net Zero Carbon future and invites all stakeholders to contribute with papers on how RES and the electricity sector as a whole can serve the most of their part towards this future.

The technical scope of the 11th IET RPG, 2022 includes:

Wind technology
PV systems technology
Grid integration, technologies, compliance and assessments
Other renewable energy sources
Battery and energy storage systems

Full details about the technical scope can be found here: https://rpg.theiet.org/author-information/technical-scope/

You may submit your one A4 page long abstracts here by January 28th 2022: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/2960/submitter All accepted and presented papers will be indexed in IET Inspec, IEEE Explore Digital Library and EI Compendex.

Standard IEEE 2660.1-2020 Published

Panayiotis Moutis — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 14:09:32 -0500

February 2021

After many efforts over about a 5-year period I am happy to report the publication of the IEEE Standard 2660.1-2020 titled “Recommended Practice for Industrial Agents.” You can find it here. We are moving fast into an IoT era where local decision making either in the form of optimization, control action or system assessment, becomes critical and widespread. The most typical software entity that performs some type of any activity at a local level and in the form of a module is the ‘agent.’ Agents have been the backbone of many approaches, paradigms and architectures in dozens of applications. However, there is little information or methodology of how an agent should be deployed for a certain purpose, how to interact with other agents or the equipment it drives and the data it collects. This standard introduces exactly that. An algorithm (in the abstract sense) that takes into account the premises of an application and ranks according to various metrics which type of programming, organizing and communication protocols would fit best the said application.

This standard represents a major step forward in opening up a wide and clearly specified path for agents to be deployed in applications of the buildings, industrial, power, energy and other sectors. Stakeholders in these fields can employ this standard to best define the value of every different agent implementation in light of each application scoped.

I have been fortunate to work with great collaborators and honored to serve as the subgroup chair for the Energy & Power systems applications.

Appointed Regional Editor at IET RPG Journal

Panayiotis Moutis — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 11:54:29 -0500

January 2021

I am delighted to report that the Editor- and Deputy-Editor-in-Chief at the Institute of Engineering & Technology (IET) Renewable Power Generation (RPG) journal have appointed me Regional Editor of these publications for North America. I am humbled by the role and will work hard to promote the activities of the journal.

This appointment follows that of the Associate Editor in the same journal and on the subject of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems, as of my expertise on Virtual Power Plants. Although, as you may know, I am senior member, volunteer and ‘big fan’ of the IEEE, I cannot contain my enthusiasm about how the IET RPG devotes a subject and editorial team on the broader subject of hybrid renewable energy systems, especially given the fact that virtual power plants (either including renewables or not) are on the rise (see OhmConnect, Enbala, SunRun, Enel X, Stem).

Please, contact me to propose Special Issues or for questions about submissions under the subject of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems. I will be glad to help!

Appointed to the IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee

Panayiotis Moutis — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 13:43:08 -0500

December 2020

I am joining the IEEE USA Energy Policy Committee (EPC), following the particularly honoring nomination by Prof. Parisini, President of the IEEE Control Systems Society. I am looking forward to serve my role in resolving the energy challenges in the US by offering my best technical counsel.

The IEEE-USA EPC publishes position statements and white papers targeted at the legislative and executive branches of the US government and revolves around the matters of energy modernization and diversification, workforce training and advancement, security of infrastructure, promoting technology innovations, and reducing barriers in implementing all of the above.

recent papers

Panayiotis Moutis — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 13:24:27 -0400

March 2020

I would like to update you about some of my recent publications with great colleagues on particularly interesting topics.

Starting from the latest one, my work with Omid Mousavi from DEPsys SA on the Digital Twin of the Medium Voltage side of a Distribution Transformer based on Low Voltage side measurements was published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery. The proposal, practically, eliminates the requirements for costly medium voltage side instrument transformers, that also require network disruptions to be installed. Harmonics and system faults are captured with remarkable accuracy! You can find a preprint here.

Guannan He˜s & Rebecca Ciez˜s revolutionary idea about redefining the end of life of battery storage systems based on their use value was published in the Applied Energy journal of Elsevier and can be found here. The study argues that value drawn from a specific use of a battery might be turning negative earlier than the technical/chemical end of life of the battery. With this in mind, the battery may be repurposed to other uses that will be profitable making best use of its lifetime. I am delighted to have collaborated in this work!

There are also two conference papers from 2020 IEEE International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering and 2020 IEEE Industrial and Commercial Power Systems Europe (EEEIC/I&CPS Europe), which I was honored to be invited to submit them as IEEE IAS journal publications as well! The first one is my work with Soummya Kar from CMU ECE on Assessing the effect of linear approximations to the Optimal Power Flow (OPF) accuracy and performance, considering the adequate modeling of line resistances. In the picture above we demonstrate how accounting for line resistances (especially important for distribution systems) can improve the approximation of the voltage angles in OPF.

The second one again with Omid Mousavi from DEPsys SA discusses the different Monitoring Requirements for the Realization of State Estimation at Distribution Systems and you can access it here.

Call for papers & a note on Open Access

Panayiotis Moutis — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 13:24:27 -0400

Last updated October 2021 (originally published March 2020)

Update: The IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy is now indexed on Scopus! This is great news for an Open Access effort in the field of Power and Energy research that has started no more than 2 years ago! Many congratulations to the Editor-in-Chief Prof. Fran Li for his role in ensuring the highest quality of publications and to everyone who has worked to bring IEEE OAJPE to this first milestone of prominence. I am very proud to work by their side from the very first few days of this Open Access journal!

~ * ~

As of Jan. 2020 I have joined the Associate Editors roster of the IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy and am, thus, kindly inviting colleagues & peers in the community of Power System R&D to submit their recent works. Given this opportunity, I would like to express some thoughts about Open Access (OA), the current status in the respective publications field, and how the IEEE is fundamentally different by contributing positively to OA

On Open Access

OA is seen by many as the silver bullet in the era of the misinformed public and the need for wider access to knowledge worldwide. Before OA became common practice, a Reader or an Institution would subscribe or pay one-time-fees to access papers or journals. In the most typical OA model instead, the Author of an accepted paper pays to allow everyone and forever to read her/his work (provided they have internet connection). In most cases, the OA paper fees are then charged to a grant for R&D or some other discretionary account. There are many initiatives and organizations (here and here) that have been spearheading and representing the benefits of OA and how to best employ and take advantage of them.

Much criticism is floating around about OA; indicatively, read here, here and here. The major arguments against OA are directed at the numerous (frequently predatory) publishers that have popped up in the last 10-15 years. These publishers have the sole purpose of publishing OA journals; let us, following, call these latter publishers as predators. How did this criticism gain steam? Academic publishers are for-profit organizations; traditional publishers’ revenues come mostly from subscriptions and a few authors OA fees, while predators’ revenues come exclusively from authors OA fees. These revenues are then used to enhance the quality and expand/update the range of their scientific publications. To do so, publishers need to be catching up regularly with the latest advances in every field. How is that done? By publishers joining or sponsoring conferences (see proceedings) and maintaining strong and long-standing relationships with scholars, experts, universities and the industry. The critics believe that the predators do not have the capacity or have not shown actual interest in advancing their publications. Which comes in contrast to the traditional publishers such as the the IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, etc

I will attempt a deeper dive on the topic with some observations I made in the past few years, solely on my field of Electric Power Systems and the very relevant areas. I will not use references and specific names, because some predators targeted and harassed their critics, despite the criticism being constructive and well-documented. A side note here: when criticism is unfair or unfounded, you do not harass the critic or the institution; you sue and demand truth and fairness be restored. In the cases that have made me skeptical of naming predators and point to their practices, the legal path was not how they chose to act; hence, feel free to draw some first conclusions at this point

On to the deeper dive In the field of Power Systems R&D, the acceptance rates in journals, which have historically disseminated all impactful works that shaped the sector, are not greater than 20% by average (easy to search these statistics). It is shocking to discover that in OA journals of predators the same rates are by minimum 40%! Even assuming that no special kind of leniency or absence of peer review is practiced (not the average case see here), it is clear that predators are systemizing their ˜money-making processes to the absolute maximum. Another point of concern here is that some of the most ˜successful predators, do not make their revenues easily available/public Nevertheless, one might argue here that a financially-healthy publisher is a good publisher, hence, in the long-term and based on its revenues, will expand the journals range according to new topics, trends and so on. But is that plausible for predators?

As mentioned earlier, to achieve the last point, a publisher needs strong relationships with renown authorities in the field and persistent presence in scientific meetings and industry panels. In many of the OA journals of predators in our field, there are hundreds of editors and dozens of special issues. One can only wonder how a predator can actually navigate the landscape for such an effort! Moreover, most of the traditional publishing powerhouses, have had also other types of collaborations with the experts and scholars in the field, such as books, sponsored workshops, conferences and forums, development of standards, etc. Predators have scarce or no presence at all in such activities, despite being around for over 10 years. Hence, the question naturally occurs: what is the value added by the extremely efficient (put nicely) business model of the predators which publish solely OA, have zero to limited interactions with the field they publish for, are seemingly driven only by a high-numbers-short-times agenda, and do not aim to advance the relevant R&D?

No one, of course, can claim that predators are indifferent to science. Many world renown scholars have joined the ranks of some predators and avidly express their hopes and aspirations that these publishers will shape decisively the landscape of OA thanks to their efficiency and their single-purpose agenda. In other words, the glass is definitely half-full and half-empty Regardless of the perspective on the matter though, the aforementioned concerns stemming from the practices of predators are real, founded and have cast a shadow on OA. And this is where I believe the difference between the way OA is employed by predators and traditional publishers shows clearly. A difference even more glaring when the publisher is the IEEE!

I joined the IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy as an Associate Editor, because I believe that the IEEE is aligning with OA in the same sense as it has been a lighthouse of scientific and professional development of Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineers and Engineering since its inception. Because I believe that, if the model for peer-reviewed publications is about to change, it should be done by the institutions and the experts that have been spearheading and representing the R&D in the field that brought us to where we are today. Because I believe that transparency of operations and proven support of the scholars and professionals are a sufficient indication of focus and dedication to science and its applications rather than an aim for profits that might well weaken the long-term goal of science which is the betterment of society. In other words, I fail to see how any institution other than the IEEE can best employ and promote Open Access, and I am delighted to be part of this effort!