On May 4th, I am going to present our work on “Decentralized Welfare Optimization for Energy Communities” at the 2024 Northeast Systems and Control Workshop, which is going to be held at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Northeast Systems and Control Workshop (NECSW) aims to provide a forum for systems and control researchers in the Northeast to present their work, and interact with local graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty in an informal and collaborative setting.
Alongside some colleagues, I am organizing the SIGEnergy Graduate Student Seminar series this year.
If you are a MSc/PhD/Postdoc or even a faculty and would like to present any of your published work (see scope below) to a group of graduate students and postdocs from all over the world, please fill the following signup form:
SIGEnergy covers a broad range of topics in energy informatics, energy system design, analysis, and operation ranging from building energy management, renewable energy modelling and integration, energy storage system analysis, electric vehicle modelling and optimal operation, data-centre energy management, and energy impact on climate and society.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
I have been selected to participate in the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit graduate student program. The 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit will be held on May 22-24 in Dallas, Texas.
Our paper, "Resource Sharing in Energy Communities: A Cooperative Game Approach," has been accepted at IEEE PES General Meeting 2024 in Seattle, WA.
arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18792
The paper focuses on showing the advantages of ex-ante resource allocation mechanisms over well-established ex-post mechanisms such as the Shapley value and the proportional rule. Two community DER scheduling algorithms are examined. The first is a community with centrally controlled DER, whereas the second is decentralized letting its members schedule their own DER locally. For both communities, we prove that the cooperative game's value function is superadditive, hence the grand coalition achieves the highest welfare. We also prove the balancedness of the cooperative game under the two DER scheduling algorithms, which means that there is a welfare re-distribution scheme that de-incentivizes players from leaving the grand coalition to form smaller ones.
Thrilled to announce that our latest journal paper on "Dynamic Net Metering for Energy Communities" has been accepted for publication at the IEEE Transactions on Energy Markets, Policy and Regulation (arXiv). The paper employs mechanism design and control & optimization of prosumers with different DER compositions to propose a pricing mechanism that, in addition to being competitive with the lucrative retail programs by the DSO, it achieves the community’s welfare optimality in a decentralized fashion. More on the paper below.
This paper proposes Dynamic NEM (D-NEM) — a social welfare maximizing market mechanism for an energy community that aggregates individual and community-shared energy resources under a general net energy metering (NEM) policy. D-NEM dynamically sets the community NEM prices based on aggregated community resources, including flexible consumption, storage, and renewable generation. It guarantees a higher benefit to each community member than possible outside the community, and no sub-communities would be better off departing from its parent community. D-NEM aligns each member’s incentive with that of
the community such that each member maximizing individual surplus under D-NEM results in maximum community social welfare.
I enjoyed attending the PSERC 2023 IAB Meeting @GeorgiaTech* (Dec. 6th — Dec. 8th). It was a great opportunity to connect with experts from Academia and industry. Also, it was fun to revisit GeorgiaTech and Atlanta again after I studied there in my B.Sc. as an exchange student in Fall 2014!
* The Industry Advisory Board (IAB), composed of PSERC’s industry members, meets twice per year with PSERC researchers and students to conduct business and to engage in discussions about research and education activities
I recently published an arXiv preprint on resource and flexibility sharing in energy communities. The focus in this work is to show the advantages of ex-ante re-distribution mechanisms over the well-established ex-post mechanisms such as the Shapley value and the proportional rule.
The paper’s abstract is provided below:
We analyze the overall benefits of an energy community cooperative game under which distributed energy resources (DER) are shared behind a regulated distribution utility meter under a general net energy metering (NEM) tariff. Two community DER scheduling algorithms are examined. The first is a community with centrally controlled DER, whereas the second is decentralized letting its members schedule their own DER locally. For both communities, we prove that the cooperative game’s value function is superadditive, hence the grand coalition achieves the highest welfare. We also prove the balancedness of the cooperative game under the two DER scheduling algorithms, which means that there is a welfare re-distribution scheme that de-incentivizes players from leaving the grand coalition to form smaller ones. Lastly, we present five ex-post and an ex-ante welfare re-distribution mechanisms and evaluate them in simulation, in addition to investigating the performance of various community sizes under the two DER scheduling algorithms.
On Monday, Nov. 13th, I attended the 2023 Urban Tech Academy at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island.
The academy “offered a deep dive into the technical challenges and opportunities that decarbonizing our energy and mobility systems presents”. It was a great opportunity to meet with students, faculty and researchers from both industry and academia.
Happy to share that I have been selected alongside 29 doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars to join the 2023-2024 cohort of NextGen Professors (link).
NextGen Professors is a career-development program focused on preparing Cornell graduate students and postdocs for faculty careers across institutional types.
Our paper on “Operating-Envelopes-Aware Decentralized Welfare Maximization for Energy Communities” has been presented today at the 59th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL.
Coalition price, and community members optimal decisions.
The paper is a result of a collaborative work with researchers from the Power System Engineering Center (PSEC) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
I presented our work on “Grid-Aware Decentralized Welfare Maximization for Energy Communities” at the NREL’s 6th Workshop on Autonomous Energy Systems in Golden, CO (September 6—8, 2023).
The poster and summary slides are provided below:
Also, our work on DER aggregation, entitled “DSO-DERA Coordination for the Wholesale Market Participation of Distributed Energy Resources,” was presented by my colleague Cong Chen:
We recently uploaded an arXiv preprint on "Wholesale Market Participation of DERA Part II: Competitive DER Aggregation." This paper, which can be accessed at https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02004, proposes a competitive DER aggregation of a profit-seeking DERA in the wholesale electricity market. The first part of the paper can be accessed at https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01999.
The paper’s abstract is given below:
DERA model’s physical and financial interactions. The red arrows show the bidirectional power flow, the green for the financial transactions, and the blue for control signals.
We consider competitive DER aggregation that maximizes the DER aggregator’s (DERA) profit subject to that each customer of the DERA gains no less surplus and pays no higher energy cost than that under the regulated retail tariff. The DERA participates in the wholesale electricity market as virtual storage with optimized generation offers and consumption bids derived from the DERA’s competitive aggregation. Also derived are DERA’s bid curves for the access limits auction considered in Part I. We show that, with sufficiently high access limits, the proposed DERA’s wholesale participation achieves the same welfare-maximizing outcome as when its customers participate directly in the wholesale electricity market. Numerical studies compare the proposed competitive DER aggregation with existing benchmarks on surpluses of DERA’s customers, DERA profits, and the overall social welfare as functions of the DER adoption level in the distribution system.
Last Friday, I concluded my 3 months internship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). During my PhD summer research internship at NREL I had the privilege of immersing myself in a dynamic and innovative environment dedicated to advancing clean and sustainable energy solutions. At NREL, I was part of the energy systems control and optimization group, under which I worked on a project involving autonomous energy systems with a focus on the human dimension. My summer work will be presented at the IEEE 59th Annual Allerton Conference On Communication, Control, and Computing. Part of my summer work will be presented at the NREL 6th Autonomous Energy Systems (AES) Workshop in September.
I am grateful to all of my mentors at NREL for their incredible support and guidance. I am also thankful to all the other researchers and engineers at NREL whom I met and exchanged ideas with.
I just published a new blog post on: “BTM and FTM DER: What Is The Difference?”
Link: https://ahmedsa1.medium.com/btm-and-ftm-der-what-is-the-difference-b1919f402eb7.
To read more blog posts, click here.
It was great connecting with many friends and familiar faces at the IEEE 2023 PES General Meeting. I presented our conference paper on “Dynamic Net Metering”, and also participated in the transaction paper sessions by presenting our work on “Net Metering X”. The feedback and discussions that followed the presentations expanded my knowledge and enabled me to connect with experts working on the same area. I also served as a judge for the student poster competition.
I will be serving as a judge at the 2023 IEEE PES General Meeting Student Poster Competition. The conference will be held in person at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Florida on 16 – 20 July 2023. I am very excited to learn more about the presented projects .
We recently uploaded an arXiv preprint on "Dynamic Net Metering for Energy Communities." This paper, which can be accessed from https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13677, delves into the innovative concept of dynamic net metering and its potential in revolutionizing energy communities. By proposing a novel framework that considers real-time changes in community behind-the-meter and central DER and flexible consumption, this research aims to efficiently balance communities’s resources, maximize social welfare, and achieve individual and group rationalities via an incentive mechanism design.
I was happy to attend and actively engage in the 41st International Energy Workshop in Colorado School of Mines (CSM), Golden, CO, which featured many great talks that discussed the emerging energy sector issues, including energy markets, renewables, and electricity system modeling.
The workshop was co-hosted by both CSM and NREL.
On May 15th of 2023, I officially began my internship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), working with the Energy Systems Control and Optimization Group under Power Systems Engineering Center (PSEC) in NREL’s south table mountain campus, Golden, CO.
NREL is renowned for its groundbreaking research and innovation in the field of renewable energy. From the moment I stepped foot on the NREL campus, I could feel the palpable passion and commitment to a sustainable future. Working alongside experienced mentors and talented colleagues, I am eager to contribute to the development of renewable energy solutions that will shape our world.
My work at NREL tackles understanding the human-dimension of energy systems. In particular, we aim to devise methods for control of networked systems of possibly non-compliant agents and to establish mathematical tools for the analysis of their performance.
