Lecture: May 15, 2012

www.stanford.edu/class/ee392n


GridSpice - A Virtual Test Bed for Smart Grid

Amit Narayan, GridSpice

Bio

Dr Amit Narayan is the Director of Smart Grid Research in Modeling & Simulation at Stanford University where he is leading an interdisciplinary project related to modeling, optimization and control of the electricity grid and associated electricity markets.

In addition to his position at Stanford, Dr. Narayan is also the Founder of AutoGrid, Inc, a company providing a new generation of software analytics for the Smart Grid.

Prior to joining Stanford, Dr. Narayan was the Vice President of Products at publicly traded company Magma Design Automation, Inc (Nasdaq: LAVA) where he led the product development and product management teams responsible for Magma's flagship product in the design implementation area. Over fifty percent of all semiconductor chips used in consumer electronic devices such as smart phones, blue-ray players and video games are designed using products developed by Dr. Narayan’s team at Magma.

Prior to joining Magma, Dr. Narayan founded Berkeley Design Automation, Inc (BDA), a venture backed company in the area of analog and radio-frequency semiconductor design software space and served as its founding CEO and later Vice President of Engineering incharge of all research and product development activities as well as customer engagements. Under Dr. Narayan’s leadership, BDA saw its products being adopted by over 100 semiconductor companies in the world including over 20 out of the top 25. Dr. Narayan’s work at BDA was conferred with the EDN’s "Innovation for the Year" award in 2006 for delivering significant advances in technology and product development to Electronics Industry.

Dr. Narayan received his B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur and Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Narayan has published over 25 papers in the area of design automation, holds seven US patents and is an active advisor to several startup companies in the bay area.

Abstract

The electric power industry is undergoing a transformation unlike anything it has seen in over a century. Utilities are absorbing new technologies and innovative pricing models while being subjected to an increasingly competitive marketplace. Current simulation tools are narrowly focused either on distribution operations, transmission planning, or wholesale markets. Effective integration of modern elements such as renewables, storage, distributed generation, and electrical vehicles require models that capture the interactions between many facets of the grid, including generation, transmission, distribution, storage, and loads. GridSpice aims to address this need by integrating best-in-class open-source packages for transmission and distribution simulation into a unified framework, as well as adding new features and capabilities for modeling modern grid elements. GridSpice is a web-based, open-source, and easily extensible tool for utilities, energy services providers, regulators, researchers, educators, and students to help evaluate, develop and deploy new ideas for making our future energy infrastructure more sustainable. The GridSpice simulator core takes advantage of modern software architectures, running on the Amazon EC2 cloud, spawning on-demand parallel virtual machines to meet simulation demands. The simulation user interface is hosted online, and can be easily accessed through a web-browser without requiring any software installation, or custom configuration, making it accessible to a wide audience. The GridSpice simulator has already been used for a number of example cases, including a demonstration of a method known as IVVCDR which saves power on distribution feeders by maintaining a smoother voltage profile using demand response instead of traditional volt/var equipment [1]. All software has been released in open source for public use on our website under the BSD license. The software is slotted for use in a graduate course on power systems this year.

Lecture Notes

Not Available