Past
The Power Professorship Program was initiated in
1972 with the major objectives of maintaining and
improving power engineering education at Washington
State University, to promote close university-industry
ties to provide the capability to respond to research
needs of the sponsoring organizations.
Present
The power engineering program at WSU continues
its high profile in the profession. Our students
and faculty participate in large numbers in the
main power engineering conferences around the world.
Our faculty continue to be active in leadership
roles in the profession.
Prof.
Cliff Mosher continues to organize
the Western Protective Relay Conference held in Spokane
every October and in 2000, again established a record
for attendance with individuals and corporations from
all over the world. This successful annual conference
has now spawned a new conference called the Western
Power Delivery Automation Conference.
The first one was held in March 1999 in Spokane with
attendance over 200 and a strong industrial exhibition.
This has quickly become a successful annual conference.
The Hands-On Relay School has been annually held in
Pullman in March and the 2000 school was again oversubscribed
with us having to turn down many applicants.
Prof. Luis Perez,
a WSU alummnus was visiting for the year and taught
the power protection courses. He also worked a project
on the application of neural networks to line protection.
Prof. Kevin Tomsovic
has returned from leave during 99-00 year where he
held an endowed visiting professorship at Kumamoto
University, Japan.
Prof.
Robert Olsen continues to be affiliated
with EPRI, where previously he was on loan as a project
manager, and is now finishing up some of the projects
he started.
Prof. Anjan Bose
served on the blue ribbon panel set up by the USDOE
Secretary Bill Richardson to investigate several
power outages in the summer of 1999. In response
to the high media profile of power system problems
in the West, Prof. Bose also contributed an op-ed
piece distributed nationally by Knight Ridder, emphasizing
the importance of addressing basic engineering fundamentals.
WSU had teamed up with Texas A&M University
to develop new ways of teaching power engineering
in this new era of industry restructuring. This
project, called MERIT2000, was supported by NSF
and EPRI for 3 years. Several new course modules
were developed with the advice of the power industry
in Texas and the Northwest.
The Power System Engineering Research Center (PSERC)
is the multi-university NSF-sponsored center that
WSU joined in 1998. This center, led by Cornell
University, had five universities and fifteen industrial
sponsors when WSU joined. NSF has encouraged growth
of universities involved are Cornell, Illinois,
Wisconsin, Cal-Berkeley, Washington State, Iowa
State, Arizona State, Colorado School of Mines,
Georgia Tech, Texas A&M and Carnagie Mellon,
in chronological order of the joining the center.
In PSERC, WSU has been involved in 3 research projects
pertaining to the secure operation and the setting
to transfer limits and the importance of the transparency
of these limits for market operations. These projects
were suggested by the industrial partners from the
west (Portland GE, PG&E, BC Hydro) and our joining
this consortium has had an immediate effect on the
research directions.
In addition to the PSERC projects themselves, the
increasing visibility of PSERC as the premier institution
to conduct academic research in power engineering,
has resulted in several large projects. The first
was sponsored by EPRI and the Department of Defense
on the operation and security of the power grid
and its integrated control and communication network.
This is a five year project with Profs. Bose, Saberi,
Tomsovic and Venkatasubramanian from WSU participating.
The second is actually a series of projects supported
by DOE and power system reliability. The DOE is
supporting the Consortium for Electric Reliability
Technology Solutions (CERTS) which is made up of
PSERC and several national laboratories to conduct
research on this subject. WSU has been involved
in both distributed generation and real-time control
aspects of this research. Some of the real-time
control work is being done in collaboration with
Sandia National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory. It is expected that DOE will
continue supporting this area of research with increasing
funds to ensure that power system reliability is
not compromised during the restructuring process.
The cover of this year's annual report is a picture
of the ALL-Dielectric Self-Supporting (ADSS) fiber
optic cable developed here at WSU by Pat Pedrow
and Bob Olsen.
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