Tyler Phillips, a Ph.D. candidate in the Computational Math, Science and Engineering emphasis in the Computing Ph.D. Program began working as a research fellow at Idaho National Laboratory in August of last year, (see the previous article). Since starting his fellowship Phillips has contributed to three publications focused on resilience metrics in power systems. “To date, there is not an accepted way to quantify the resilience of a power system.” Phillips’ paper “An Operational Resilience Metric for Modern Power Distribution Systems,” introduces an operational metric based on the adaptive capacity of assets of the system to evaluate resilience.
“Resilience is characterized by the ability to anticipate, respond, and recover from extreme events,” which is not only a common theme of 2020 but also brought about Tyler’s main focus for research during his fellowship at INL. “There is an increasing need for resilience and a methodology for evaluating resilience in power systems. Currently, power systems have been designed utilizing a set of reliability metrics, but these metrics have been proven ineffective to high-impact low-probability extreme events such as hurricanes, winter storms, floods, and wildfires.”
The following papers, “A Framework for Evaluating the Resilience Contribution of Solar PV and Battery Storage on the Grid” and “A Metric Framework for Evaluating the Resilience Contribution of Hydropower to the Grid,” take a more focused approach to solar PV and battery storage assets, as well as hydropower assets. The latter paper was recently awarded “Best Paper” at the international Resilience Week conference for research on the performance of hydropower related to extreme events. As of November 2, “A Framework for Evaluating the Resilience Contribution of Solar PV and Battery Storage on the Grid” was published. “A Metric Framework for Evaluating the Resilience Contribution of Hydropower to the Grid” was also published.
The fellowship program is a collaboration between INL and universities and provides financial support and mentoring for outstanding students, including providing Tyler with a $60,000 yearly salary and covered tuition expenses while he conducts research at INL.
Tyler will defend his dissertation on December 11th and will graduate this winter.