ElSharkawi This award supports a planning visit by Dr. Mohamed El-Sharkawi, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, to develop a cooperative research project with Egyptian scientists. His collaborators are Dr. Amal Zaki Mohamed, Electronic Research Institute, Cairo and Dr. Radwan Abdel-Hamid, Helwan University, Helwan, Egypt. The research will address network integration of renewable energy.
Intellectual merit: With the shortage of energy worldwide and the lingering blackouts, new sources of power, especially using renewable power sources such as wind and solar, are being introduced in the electrical power grids. This introduces specific types of problems related to the cycling nature of these sources; such problems require researchers to identify innovative approaches for power system planning, operation and control. This field is of great interest to researchers in the USA and Egypt. The renewable energy systems in both countries are growing rapidly, they soon will reach the level when their impact on existing networks must be carefully analyzed to maximize their benefits and ensure their harmony with the rest of the network. So far, the knowledge is very limited on how to effectively integrate these renewable systems into existing power networks. This is an optimization problem at the market and network levels. One way to analyze this problem is by modeling the economic and operational aspects of the renewable energy as a multi-objective optimization problem.
Broader impacts: Renewable energy and its integration in existing fossil fuel power systems is a very important topic in dealing with the dual problems of fossil fuel shortages and their environmental impacts. Research in this area by US researchers and their Egyptians counterpart would be mutually beneficial. The PIs expect to develop joint projects between the Egyptian and the US researchers in the area of integrating wind energy and solar energy into existing power networks. Solving some of the system-level problems is expected to raise wind and solar energy to acceptable levels of economic and network performance, thus encouraging further expansion in these vital sources of energy. This project is being funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Electrical and Communications Systems.
