Unreliable power grids in sub-Saharan countries have forced households to seek on-site generation (self-generation) options. Although diesel generators the largest share of backup systems, use solar systems has been growing over years. This paper presents a system including PV panels, battery and hot water (SHW) provide both reliable energy households. Moreover, two different configurations stu...

We propose an approach based on neural networks and the AC power flow equations to identify singleand doubleline outages in a power grid using the information from phasor measurement unit sensors (PMUs). Rather than inferring the outage from the sensor data by inverting the physical model, our approach uses the AC model to simulate sensor responses to all outages of interest under multiple dema...

This paper studies the steady-state availability of systems with times to outages and recoveries that are generally distributed. Availability bounds are derived for systems with limited information about the distributions. Also investigated are the applicability of convenient exponential models in evaluating availability for systems that have two-sided bounded distributions of times to planned ...

This paper presents a dynamic programming (DP) model of an electric utility’s optimal policy for operating a nuclear power plant (NPP). The utility chooses the level of capacity utilization of the NPP as a function of signals about the NPP’s current operating state. In each period the utility must determine whether or not to operate the reactor, or shut it down for preventive maintenance or ref...

Electric grid faults can ignite catastrophic wildfires, particularly in regions with high winds and low humidity. In real-time operations, electric utilities have few options for wildfire risk mitigation, leading to use of disruptive measures such as proactive de-energization equipment, frequently referred public safety power shut-offs. Such shut-offs significant impacts on customers, who exper...

Much power system behavior goes unstudied because it lies outside the conventional software environment of the industry. Large cascading outages, for example, are rare events and are not considered in reliability investigations. Experience in using a cluster to investigate cascading outages will be reported in which 160,000 major disturbances were produced for a 3000 bus system. Cluster applica...