This workshop will bring together leading international researchers from Germany, Japan and the United States to discuss how to address the rapidly changing demands being placed on the power grid. The recent deployment and integration of more renewable energy sources to the electric power grid coupled with the shutting down of nuclear units in some countries or switching over from coal to natural gas is placing unprecedented stresses on the power grids around the world. This workshop will investigate new system architectures and control paradigms to address these challenges.
An electricity supply less reliant on fossil fuels is central to any meaningful approach to a sustainable energy future. Encouragingly, renewable generation has grown rapidly in recent years. The US will have 65 GW of installed wind capacity by the end of 2014 with anticipated continued rapid growth for several years. Solar PV costs have dropped dramatically. Internationally for reasons of safety, national security and environmental concern, we see similar trends as well as the shutting down of nuclear generation. These changes all place new demands on the existing power transmission infrastructure. Germany and Japan have some of the most aggressive plans for moving to a low carbon future. This workshop with the support of the Japan Science and Technology (JST) Agency and the German Research Foundation (DFG) will bring together researchers and educators in electric energy and sustainability from across the globe to discuss relevant issues to these changes.
A primary goal of the workshop is to learn about research activities in power and energy from the different countries and to discuss ways to leverage the on-going efforts and develop collaborations. Specifically, we wish to take advantage of the progressive changes in electricity sources occurring in Germany, Japan and the US and learn from these developments. Topics for discussion include renewable energy generation, the smart grid, demand response, energy storage, HVDC and supergrids, distributed controls, microgrids and various new control paradigms. The workshop will examine control, communication, computational science, environmental, energy, power systems and social aspects of electric energy and sustainability. A report will be generated discussing accomplishments of workshop along with action items.
