CECS Leads Effort to Advance U.S. Renewable Energy and Electric Grid
UCF has been awarded $3.2 million to lead one of four national consortia to develop distributed technologies, to increase engineering capacity, and to prepare for a national shift from traditional sources of electricity to renewables such as solar and wind.
“This multi-university collaborative effort demonstrates our institutional commitment to being one of America’s leading partnership universities,” said Michael Georgiopoulos, dean of the College of Engineering & Computer Science.
The team’s winning proposal, Foundations for Engineering Education for Distributed Energy Resources (FEEDER), is a part of broader U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) investment of $12 million to increase the nation’s capacity to support distributed energy technologies.
The FEEDER center will bring together seven universities, eight utility companies, two national laboratories and eight industry partners (see list of partners below) to speed up the development of technologies needed to prepare nation’s electric grid to operate on renewable energy sources.
Zhihua Qu, professor and chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UCF, is the lead researcher on the FEEDER grant.
“The FEEDER center will research technological components such as distributed control, optimization, advanced communication, renewable generation and smart grid, to transform the electric grid,” Dr. Qu said. “It will also focus on education by establishing cross-institutional smart grid curriculum, facilitating research collaborations among the academic, utility and industrial partners, and incorporating the latest and most relevant research findings into new educational materials and courseware.”
Within UCF, the project team consists of seven faculty members in the relevant technical areas and also involves UCF’s Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC). ECE and FSEC have successfully completed their grid integration projects for the DoE and are also being funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and Harris Corporation to conduct fundamental and applied research in smart grid, electric vehicles, as well as solar and ocean energy.
By upgrading the power engineering systems engineering programs at participating universities, FEEDER aims to attract and educate more students to become future power engineers, to address real-world research & development challenges, to train existing workforce and speed up technology transfers, and to realize smart grid implementation, said Qu. FEEDER’s 31 electrical engineering faculty focus their efforts on improving energy independence and sustainability for our nation and its economy.
FEEDER is supported by the DOE’s SunShot Initiative and through the Grid Engineering for Accelerated Renewable Energy Deployment (GEARED) program.
FEEDER CONSORTIUM:
Seven universities: UCF; University of Kentucky; University of South Carolina; Florida State University; Auburn University; University of Arkansas and University of Florida
Eight utility companies: Southern Company; Duke Energy; Florida Power & Light; Tennessee Valley Authority; Kentucky Power; Orlando Utilities Commission; Lakeland Electric and the East Kentucky Power Cooperative
Two national labs: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL); Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Seven industry partners: Northern Plains Power Technologies; OSI Soft LLC; S&C Electric Company; SAIC; LEIDOS; Schneider Electric, and Siemens
Eight industry partners, including: Siemens, SAIC, LEIDOS, and Schneider Electric
— CECS —