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With the advent of a new Precision Time Protocol specification, new opportunities abound for clock synchronization possibilities within power grid control systems. The third iteration of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standard 1588 specification provides several new features specifically aimed at complex, wide-area deployments in which situational awareness and control require precise time agreement. This paper describes the challenges faced by existing technology, introduces the new time distribution specification, and provides examples to explain how it represents a game-changing innovation.

As modern engineering systems grow in complexity, attitudes toward a modular design approach become increasingly more favorable. A key challenge to a modular design approach is the certification of robust stability under uncertainties in the rest of the network. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying the parametric region, which guarantees stability of the connected module in the robust sense under uncertainties. We derive the conditions under which the robust stability of the connected module is guaranteed for some values of the design parameters, and present a sum-of-squares (SOS) optimization-based algorithm to identify such a parametric region for polynomial systems. Using the example of an inverter-based microgrid, we show how this parametric region changes with variations in the level of uncertainties in the network., accepted for presentation at the IEEE 2019 American Control Conference

This paper describes a one-credit laboratory course for freshmen majoring in electrical and computer engineering (ECE). The course is motivational in nature and exposes the students to a wide range of areas of electrical and computer engineering. The authors believe it is important to give freshmen a broad perspective of what ECE is all about, and to shine some light on topics they will see later in the curriculum. Yet with limited total credit hours in the curriculum, the ECE Department did not want to commit a significant number of hours, nor did the Department want to take significant study time away from the students' core freshman courses, such as calculus and physics. The resulting single-credit-hour course meets only one day a week for two hours, with a format that combines both lecture and experimentation. The course is divided into a series of one- to three-week modules, each covering a selected topic in electrical and computer engineering. This paper describes the purpose, format, and content of the course. A survey of the students regarding the course is also discussed.

This paper addresses the following key questions in the discussion on the integration of renewable energy resources in the Pacific Northwest power grid: a) what will be the future balancing requirement to accommodate a simulated expansion of wind energy resources from 3.3 GW in 2008 to 14.4 GW in 2019 in the Northwest Power Pool (NWPP), and b) what are the most cost effective technological solutions for meeting the balancing requirements in the Northwest Power Pool (NWPP). A life-cycle analysis was performed to assess the least-cost technology option for meeting the new balancing requirement. The technologies considered in this study include conventional turbines (CT), sodium sulfur (NaS) batteries, lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries, pumped hydro energy storage (PH), and demand response (DR). Hybrid concepts that combine 2 or more of the technologies above are also evaluated. This analysis was performed with collaboration by the Bonneville Power Administration and funded by the Energy Storage Systems Program of the U.S. Department of Energy.

In this paper we introduce a computationally efficient method for updating a weighted Welch periodogram for nonstationary signals. Non-parametric spectral estimation techniques, such as the Welch periodogram, are highly mature topics in signal processing. They have a wide variety of applications in signal analysis including real-time applications with modern test and measurement systems. In many of these real-time applications the data is nonstationary having a power spectrum that is changing over time. This paper introduces a method of generating a weighted update of the Welch periodogram as more data becomes available. We find that for a certain class of weighting functions a computationally efficient algorithm can be found. The paper also presents calculations of the computational complexity of the updating algorithm and simulations for nonstationary signals.