Path to making power systems highly efficient, reliable, resilient, and sustainable with Javad Lavaei, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley

Power systems around the world are being modernized to address environmental concerns, reduce costs, and guarantee access to electricity all the time. Four main criteria for this upgrade are efficiency, reliability, resiliency, and sustainability. Recent advances in various technologies are the key enablers for this modernization. Nevertheless, such physical systems are becoming overwhelmingly large-scale and stochastic with highly complex dynamics, coupled with millions of human interactions. The operation of these systems needs disruptive changes in data processing mechanisms (such as learning), in real-time decision-making processes (such as optimization and control), in electricity markets, and in policies and regulations.

In the first part of this talk, Lavaei will discuss some major challenges behind the modernization of power grids and why addressing them needs interdisciplinary approaches that involve many different fields. In the second part, he will explain some of the research problems studied in his group. In particular, he will focus on designing customized optimization methods, distributed control techniques, and data analysis and learning tools for future power systems. Lavaei will conclude the talk by offering case studies on the grids for California, New York, Texas, Ontario, France, and different parts of Europe.

This event is open to MIT students, faculty, and staff only. 

Please note that we will open our doors to unregistered participants 15 minutes before the event start time. To guarantee your seat, we recommend you register and arrive at least 15 minutes early.

About the speaker:

Javad Lavaei is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley. He was an assistant professor in electrical engineering at Columbia University in 2012-2015. He obtained his PhD degree in control and dynamical systems from the California Institute of Technology, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Precourt Institute for Energy and electrical engineering at Stanford University in 2011-2012. He is the recipient of the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize for the best university-wide PhD thesis, entitled “Large-scale complex systems: From antenna circuits to power grids”. His research spans power systems, optimization theory, control theory, and machine learning. He has won several awards, including DARPA Young Faculty Award, DARPA Director's Fellowship, ONR Young Investigator Award, ONR Director of Research Early Career Grant, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, Google Faculty Award, and Canadian Governor General's Gold Medal. For his computational work on energy systems, he was chosen by the Resnick Sustainability Institute as one of the five innovators in the area of sustainability worldwide in 2014.

Lavaei is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IEEE Control Systems Letters, and serves on the conference editorial boards of the IEEE Control Systems Society and the European Control Association. He is a recipient of the 2015 INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers, the 2015 Best Journal Paper Award given by IEEE Power & Energy Society, the 2016 Donald P. Eckman Award given by the American Automatic Control Council, the 2016 INFORMS ENRE Energy Best Publication Award, the 2017 SIAM Control and Systems Theory Prize, and two best conference paper finalist awards from the Control Systems Society in 2014 and 2019.