Electricity demand management for networked infrastructure systems

A key challenge for modernizing our infrastructure is in capturing the close interplay of three major elements that affect their operations: physical control mechanisms, information technology, and economic and social aspects introduced by humans and retailers in the loop. This talk examines this important challenge in the context of electricity demand side management (DSM) programs in smart power grids. DSM schemes offer electricity end-users the ability to have a more flexible and price-aware consumption behavior. This would help increase market efficiency and margins of safety in power systems, particularly under high levels of renewable energy integration.

In particular, a significant amount of flexibility that DSM programs aim to harness will be due to electricity consumption that supports the delivery of goods and services by societal-scale networked infrastructure systems. Examples include: cloud computing services and Internet data centers, electric transportation systems, etc. In this talk, I discuss the role of DSM in coupling the operations of power grids with that of other infrastructure systems by introducing new feedback loops. To enable DSM in such coupled infrastructures, I present a novel model of electricity demand flexibility for infrastructure systems based on network flow optimization. Then, I present wholesale and retail pricing schemes that would allow independent system operators to collaboratively move a large population of infrastructure users towards a socially optimal congestion pattern and energy footprint. I will present several examples of the application of these algorithms towards different infrastructure systems.

Mahnoosh Alizadeh is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UCSB, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 2014 to 2016. She is broadly interested in designing monitoring, control, and economic mechanisms for societal-scale infrastructure systems and in particular smart power system. Dr. Alizadeh obtained her BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2009 and her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2014, where she was the recipient of the Richard C. Dorf award for outstanding research accomplishment.