Saifur Rahman

Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) | VT · Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute (VT-ARI)

In electrical distribution systems, the voltage quality problem considers the most restrictive issue that hinders high photovoltaic (PV) and wind integration. Therefore, this study aims at providing a reliable control method for the voltage problem in distribution networks embedded with high PV and wind sources. The proposed voltage management stra...

The uncertainty associated with photovoltaic (PV) systems is one of the core obstacles that hinder their seamless integration into power systems. The fluctuation, which is influenced by the weather conditions, poses significant challenges to local energy management systems. Hence, the accuracy of PV power forecasting is very important, particularly...

Batteries can provide valuable operational flexibility to facilitate the system efficiency. However, there lacks market environments to effectively harness and monetize the value of these assets. Most existing works apply a profit-oriented single-signal pricing scheme, which mixes the value of energy and flexibility together and may ultimately rais...

A detailed analysis of how Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings (GEB) can participate as active elements in a microgrid through on-site PV electricity generation and energy efficiency applications is presented. A case study using three US Department of Energy (DoE)-developed prototype commercial building models are used. These represent a secondary...

One of the significant prerequisites for harvesting solar energy is precise global solar radiation (GHI) forecasts. However, variability and uncertainty are inherent characteristics of solar radiation. It is challenging to show better generalization using current data analysis approaches. Thus, this research presents a new intelligence framework by...

This paper presents a robust short-term electrical load forecasting framework that can capture variations in building operation, regardless of building type and location. Nine different hybrids of recurrent neural networks and clustering are explored. The test cases involve five commercial buildings of five different building types, i.e., academic,...

Buildings, as major energy consumers, can provide great untapped demand response (DR) resources for grid services. However, their participation remains low in real-life. One major impediment for popularizing DR in buildings is the lack of cost-effective automation systems that can be widely adopted. Existing optimization-based smart building contro...

This paper describes the developed MATPLAN - a probability-based production costing tool that treats renewable energy sources as candidates in a power system expansion planning study. Similar to the structure of the well-known Wien Automatic System Planning (WASP) package, MATPLAN comprises six modules: LOAD-CALC, EXIST-GEN, CANDI-GEN, CONFIG, OPTI...

An accurate analysis of wind speeds is vital to justify wind energy projects. Statistical distributions can be used to characterize wind speeds through considering uncertainty in wind resources. However, the selection of the most suitable probability density function (PDF) is still a challenging task. Therefore, this study aims at developing a fram...

The advent of blockchain technology and the increasing penetration of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems have presented a new opportunity for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. In such transactive markets, communities may enjoy cheaper electricity prices while supporting locally produced green energy. However, there exists a considerable knowledge g...

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, implementing intelligent controls in buildings to reduce energy consumption is becoming increasingly popular. Building climate control is of strong research interest due to high energy savings potentials associated with heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) controls. Beca...

Residential HVAC control is a large untapped resource for providing regulation services to the grid. This paper presents a set of algorithms for controlling HVACs of a group of residential houses that a demand response aggregator can use to sell regulation service in the wholesale market. The focus is on the regulation market offered by the PJM RTO...

Given the considerable scale of distribution networks in urban and rural areas, as well as the lack of management records, adjustments of switches during the distribution system operation are poorly documented. Such deficiency results in the inaccuracy of models stored in the distribution network automation system, and thus misleads the state estim...

Due to the depletion of energy resources and increased energy demand, there is an increased focus on the energy consumption and management in buildings. Many building energy management (BEM) software platforms are commercially available to monitor and control energy consumption. These platforms are hosted on the physical hardware within the buildin...

The design of an effective and reliable communication network supporting smart grid applications requires the selection of appropriate communication technologies and protocols. The objective of this study is to study and quantify the capabilities of an advanced metring infrastructure (AMI) to support the simultaneous operation of major smart grid f...

Load forecasting problems have traditionally been addressed using various statistical methods, among which autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous inputs (ARIMAX) has gained the most attention as a classical time-series modeling method. Recently, the booming development of deep learning techniques make them promising alternatives to...

Design of an effective and reliable communication network supporting smart grid applications requires a selection of appropriate communication technologies and protocols. The objective of this paper is to study and quantify the capabilities of an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to support the simultaneous operation of major smart grid functi...

With the rapid development of smart grid, the penetration of renewable energy resources is higher than ever and keeps growing. However, the output of renewable energy units, such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, is characterized by sudden and unpredictable changes. This paper proposes a novel electrical peak demand curtailment allocation (...

Due to the depletion of energy resources and increased energy demand, there is an increased focus on the energy consumption and management in buildings. Many building energy management (BEM) software platforms are commercially available to monitor and control energy consumption. These platforms are hosted on the physical hardware within the buildin...

Renewable energy sources have gained momentum in electric power systems. Without the ability to precisely forecast their power production, integrating these sources to the electric power grid may affect grid stability. Support Vector Regression (SVR) is proven to be able to capture and deal with nonlinearity in forecasting problems. However, determ...

Over the last decade, increasing availability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and broadband communications technologies has enabled a number of smart applications in many cities. Among various smart city applications, a smart street lighting application is considered as one of the most cost-effective choices for a smart city today, if relying o...

This paper presents an algorithm for optimal management of aggregated power demand of a group of heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) units. The algorithm provides an advanced direct load control mechanism for HVACs that leverages the availability of smart thermostats, which are remotely programmable and controllable. The paper provides...

Power disaggregation algorithms are used to decompose building level power consumption data into individual equipment level power information. In order to ensure energy efficient operation of complex systems, such as commercial buildings, a continuous and detailed energy monitoring system is essential. In this paper a novel power disaggregation tec...

Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) are active loads as they increase the distribution network’s demand during charging and can have potential impacts on the network. This study discusses the impact of PEV charging on a distribution feeder serving commercial customers and proposes a mitigation strategy to make PEV penetration transparent to the grid....

With the advent of the smart grid, demand response (DR) has been implemented in many electric utility control areas to reduce peak demand in buildings during grid stress conditions. However, small- and medium-sized commercial buildings typically do not deploy a building energy management (BEM) system due to high costs of commercially available solu...

Implementing demand response (DR) in commercial buildings can play a major role in reducing building’s peak load. This improves the efficiency of electricity grids and mitigates expensive peak demand/energy charges for buildings. Due to the lack of Energy Management Systems, small and medium-sized commercial buildings have not historically played m...

The objective of this study is to present the architecture and laboratory experimentation of an Internet-based communication platform to enable residential demand response (DR) programmes that do not rely on the advanced metering infrastructure (smart meters). Technologies and software that serve as the building blocks for the proposed platform, to...

Plug-in electric vehicle penetration is increasing due to technical advancements and environmental concerns. Along with residential plug-in electric vehicle charging, the public charging infrastructure is much needed to reduce plug-in electric vehicles' range anxiety and foster their adoption. Renewable energy and demand management programs are con...

This paper presents a robust control design to integrate hydro generators to address increased frequency deviations in power systems with high wind power penetration. A robust control design framework for hydro governors is proposed in order to particularly tackle with disturbances from wind power fluctuation. First, by combining state equations of...

With the focus on environmental sustainability and energy security, policy makers and electric utility planners are looking at renewable energy both as supplements and alternatives. But such generation sources have their own challenges — primarily high variability, especially for solar and wind. This paper highlights the challenges and opportunitie...

A building energy management (BEM) system serves as the key element of a smart building. It facilitates grid interaction and participation of a building in a demand response (DR) program. Typically, a BEM has been designed to manage loads in a single building. However, in reality, a number of adjacently located buildings can be owned by a single en...

Demand response (DR) is a popular alternative to the control of generation assets in balancing energy production and consumption in the electric grid. The end-use electrical demand can be adjusted based on real-time electricity prices, known as price-based DR. A means to enable automatic price-based DR is to implement a transactive controller, in w...

Home energy management (HEM) systems are getting increasingly popular in both academic and commercial communities. Most HEM solutions rely on either smart appliances or plugging traditional appliances into smart outlet/smart plugs which can communicate with the central HEM server. Conventional non-communicating power-intensive loads that are direct...

An important step toward a smart grid is the “smart” application of manual or automated sectionalizing switches, which can be operated in contingency conditions in order to improve the reliability indices. However, electric utilities do not have well-defined criteria for allocation of such devices. In this paper, annual financial losses related to...

Demand Response (DR) applications along with strategically deployed solar photovoltaic (PV) and ice storage systems at the building level can help reduce building peak demand and energy consumption. Research shows that no work has been carried out to study the impact of integrated control of PV and ice storage on improving building operation and en...

Wind spill occurs due to the non-correlation between load and wind profiles, and also wind power forecast errors. Scheduling energy storage units to reduce wind spillage gets complicated considering the difference between day-ahead wind power forecast range, hour-ahead wind power forecast, and actual wind power. This paper presents an algorithm tha...

Performance testing is an important process in the embedded software development. It can detect bugs, help improve software quality and test the system reliability. The objective of this paper is to propose a performance testing method for embedded software platforms. A case study to evaluate the applicability of the proposed method is discussed. P...

Examines ways in which the PES society can implement guidelines, procedures and best practices to make the society more relevant to working professionals.

Demand Response (DR) as an option for electric utility peak load management has gained significant attention in the recent past as it helps to avoid stress conditions and possibly defer or avoid construction of new power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructures. DR in commercial buildings can play a major role in reducing peak load...

Distribution voltage profiles are subjected to overvoltage limit violations from high penetration of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems. Such voltage rises seen at the point of PV interconnection can be mitigated by adaptively changing the active and/or reactive power injection from the PV inverter. This work proposes a local voltage regulati...

A home energy management (HEM) system is an important element that potentially facilitates automated demand response (DR) participation for residential customers. This paper aims at analyzing the impact of different house sizes, appliance ratings and usage patterns on residential DR implementation based on a set of predefined DR strategies. In part...

Communication systems serve as the key element in the smart grid as it supports observability and controllability of electric power systems. However, communication failures can lead to an electric power grid operating in an abnormal state causing cascading failures. It is therefore crucial to study adverse effects of communication system failures o...

The objective of this paper is to present a multiagent system (MAS) that can enable integration of a number of IoT devices to allow grid-interactive and intelligent building operation. The proposed platform called BEMOSS — Building Energy Management Open Source Software is developed toallow sensing and control of HVAC, lighting and plug load contro...

The objective of this paper is to propose a building energy management (BEM) platform that allows sensing and control of equipment in small- and medium-sized buildings. The proposed platform aims to improve energy efficiency, reduce energy consumption, and foster demand response (DR) implementation by controlling three major loads in buildings, inc...

A rapid growth in Electric Vehicle (EV) penetration is expected in the near future. EV presents economic and environmental advantages over traditional gasoline vehicles. However, a number of EVs, if charged simultaneously, may pose some serious challenges for electric utilities especially at the distribution level. This paper investigates selected...

This paper proposes to use discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) methods to schedule grid-scale energy storage systems to mitigate wind power forecast error impacts while considering energy storage properties. This is accomplished by decomposing the wind forecast error signal to different time-varying periodic compon...

The analysis of large scale data logged from complex cyber-physical systems, such as microgrids, often entails the discovery of invariants capturing functional as well as operational relationships underlying such large systems. We describe a latent factor approach to infer invariants underlying system variables and how we can leverage these relatio...

The equivalent modeling method is extensively used in the area of power system optimization. The thermal power system can be simplified into an equivalent thermal unit in the studies where the performance of individual units is not the focus. Conventionally, the equivalent ramp rate for the equivalent thermal unit is the summation of each unit’s ra...

Due to its intermittent nature, high wind penetration requires more flexibility in the electric power grid to provide the balance. Large scale energy storage is one such option that allows the intermittency to be absorbed in real time. Two types of large scale energy storage technologies including Sodium Sulpher (NaS) battery and compressed air ene...

Integrating additional wind energy into the existing power system may cause wind curtailment due to the system operational constraints and reliability requirements. Effective ways to mitigate this problem are to use energy storage or increase transmission capacity. In this paper, the impacts of coordinating with pumped storage and increasing transm...

The objective of this paper is to propose a human expert-based approach to electrical peak demand management. The proposed approach helps to allocate demand curtailments (MW) among distribution substations (DS) or feeders in an electric utility service area based on requirements of the central load dispatch center. Demand curtailment allocation is...

Combining dynamic state estimation methods such as Kalman filters with real-time data generated/collected by digital meters such as phasor measurement units (PMU) can lead to advanced techniques for improving the quality of monitoring and controllability in smart grids. Classic Kalman filters achieve optimal performance with ideal system models, wh...

A building energy management (BEM) system is a core hardware/software platform that enables demand response applications for building operators in the smart grid environment. This paper presents the BEM algorithm that is designed to be robust against communication failures and data errors. It has been implemented in the smart building located at Yi...

Aspects of terrestrial microgrids and ship power systems are examined. The work exposes a variety of technical synergies from these two power systems to effectively advance their technologies. Understanding their overlap allows congruent efforts to target both systems; understanding their differences hinders conflict and redundancy in early-stage d...

The objective of this paper is to propose an approach for smart distribution transformer (TR) management to help implement emergency demand response (DR) at a TR. In this paper, a DR algorithm embedded in a multiagent system is presented. The proposed algorithm ensures that an instantaneous power demand at a TR is kept below a certain demand limit...

This paper extends our recent work and proposes a multi-stage coupon incentive-based demand response (M-CIDR) in two-settlement electricity markets. In contrast to the real-time pricing (RTP) or critical peak pricing (CPP) demand response programs, M-CIDR continues to offer a flat rate to retail customers and additional voluntary incentives to indu...

The objective of this paper is to identify the impact of electric vehicles (EVs) on household voltage profiles and propose possible mitigation approaches. The proposed method is based on a decentralized voltage control algorithm, aiming at maintaining nodal voltages at a distribution transformer and end-use customer meters within an acceptable limi...

Demand response applications within smart grid provide excellent opportunities for peak demand reduction through demand side load management. In the context of a smart grid, renewable energy resources are getting immensely popular as many homeowners are now opting for renewable energy systems at their residence. This paper presents a home energy ma...

Overvoltages in distribution network due to large-scale photovoltaic (PV) penetration can be overcome by controlling the real and/or reactive power injections from the PV inverter. The main objective of this work is to study the enhancement of a droop-based reactive power injection technique by active power curtailment with a purpose of local volta...

A solid-state lighting technology was demonstrated at a US Navy Research Center in Maryland – where light-emitting diode (LED) luminaires were substituted for existing high pressure sodium (HPS) streetlighting units, and an intelligent lighting control system was deployed. This paper summarizes the prudent engineering design and implementation of t...

With the introduction of the smart grid, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has become an important element in the modern power system. The successful implementation of AMI is dependent on its communication scheme that provides reliable two-way communications. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of possible AMI comm...