Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs)

Abbas El Gamal is the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering and professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He received his BSc Honors degree from Cairo University in 1972, and his MS in Statistics and PhD in Electrical Engineering both from Stanford University in 1977 and 1978, respectively. From 1978 to 1980, he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at USC. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University since 1981. From 2003 to 2012, he was Director of the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. From 2012-2017 he was Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research contributions have been in network information theory, FPGAs, digital imaging devices and systems, and smart grid modeling and control. He has authored or coauthored over 230 papers and holds 35 patents in these areas. He is coauthor of the book Network Information Theory (Cambridge Press 2011). He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE. He received several honors and awards for his research contributions, including the 2016 IEEE Richard Hamming Medal, the 2012 Claude E. Shannon Award, the 2014 Viterbi Lecture, the 2013 Shannon Memorial Lecture, the inaugural Padovani Lecture, and the 2004 INFOCOM Paper Award. He served on the Board of Governors of the Information Theory Society from 2009 to 2016 and was President in 2014. He co-founded and served on the board of directors and technical advisory boards of several Silicon Vally semiconductor, EDA, and biotech companies.

DERs are small-scale energy resources that can generate electricity, such as roof-top solar PV, store electricity, such as Tesla’s Powerwall, or whose electricity consumption can be flexibly controlled, such as EV chargers, HVACs, water heaters, and large industrial fans. DERs are located behind the meters of electricity consumers, such as in homes, commercial building and EV charging stations. With few exceptions, DERs today are mostly uncoordinated, that is, they don’t operate together toward explicitly optimizing consumer or grid objectives. I will first talk about the benefits of coordinating DERs both behind-the-meter and across the meters of different electricity consumers, and the challenges of coordinating a large number of DERs owned by different entities with different objectives and privacy constraints. I will then describe a cloud-based coordination system we developed that can overcome these challenges and its first field deployment in a California dairy farm.

The talk is based on joint work with Kyle Anderson, Thomas Navidi and Professor Ram Rajagopal’s group at Stanford.