PES Day: Webinar Series on OpenDSS
As part of the IEEE PES Day celebrations and the PES Young Professionals Continuing Education Program, a webinar series on OpenDSS will be held on four consecutive Saturdays starting from 21st of April. Whereas traditional webinars focus on disseminating knowledge on new frontiers of technology, this webinar series focuses on providing real hands-on skills (tangible skills) to the participants. This is a new strategic initiative by the PES YPs team where the long-term goal is to provide a platform for the PES members new to the field to gain hands-on skills on potentially important tools to be successful engineers. This is also an additional incentive for the graduating PES student members to continue being part of the PES Community. In the initial step of this initiative, we give priority to Free and Open Source (FOSS) tools since it is globally accessible at no cost to any enthusiast.
OpenDSS is a widely popular FOSS tool for Quasi-Static Time Series (QSTS) analysis and the main developer of this software is an IEEE Volunteer Leader who has and is, contributing immensely to IEEE by providing leadership for technical activities. OpenDSS can be used to conduct power flow studies in an unbalanced distribution. It has native models for different kinds of generation as well as storage. OpenDSS is extensively used for QSTS studies, where the distribution system dynamics can be observed over any required time period. This is especially important in the new smart grid paradigm because power flow will change based on factors such as temperature and solar irradiation level. Additionally, the impact of slow controllers such as voltage regulators and fast inverter-based distributed grid ancillary services such as volt-var control will have a significant impact on the temporal variation of the system state.
This webinar series will start by providing an introduction to the framework and principles required to use the software. Next, it will proceed to introduce the newly unveiled graphical user interface (OpenDSS-G). In the third webinar, the speaker will introduce parallel processing with OpenDSS (OpenDSS-PM), a very cool feature that makes OpenDSS even more powerful.
To top off the webinar series we plan to publish a case study. This should be analyzed by the attendees and the answer need to be submitted before the start of the fourth webinar. This fourth webinar will be conducted by another expert who will show different methods and strategies to solve the case study. The best solutions will be chosen from the submissions and prizes will be awarded. Additionally, the owners of all the successful answers will be published in the IEEE PES Day Website, Wall of Fame!
Additionally, we will open a separate forum for the attendees to interact with each other as well as to present any questions to the speakers. The instructions on how to register for the webinar series will be provided at this link next week.
To wrap up, we proudly present the bios of the two confirmed speakers who are groundbreaking gurus in the field of distribution system modeling and analysis and the tentative schedule for the webinar series. We invite all our PES brethren to attend this fun and educational webinar series! If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the IEEE PES Day team at this link or email me at hasala@ieee.org.
Roger C. Dugan, Life Fellow, IEEE
Roger is a Sr. Technical Executive with EPRI in Knoxville, Tennessee USA. He has over 45 years of combined experience in distribution engineering with EPRI, Electrotek Concepts, and Cooper Power Systems. He holds the BSEE degree from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, and the Master of Engineering in Electric Power Engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Roger has worked on many diverse aspects of power engineering over his career because of his interests in applying computer methods to power system simulation. Beginning with a student internship with Columbus and Southern Ohio Electric Co, his work has been focused on Distribution Engineering. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions in harmonics and transients analysis. More recently, he has been very active in distributed generation, particularly as it applies to utility distribution systems and distribution system analysis. His current research activities focus on advanced distribution system simulation software including:
- Distributed resources, renewable energy, harmonic analysis, and distribution planning
- Maintenance and development of OpenDSS program in support of users around the world
He was the 2005 recipient of the IEEE Excellence in Distribution Engineering Award. He received the Attwood Associate award from the US National Committee of Cigre. He is coauthor of Electrical Power Systems Quality published by McGraw-Hill, now in its 3rd edition. He serves on the IEEE PES Distribution System Analysis Subcommittee and is active in the Distribution Test Feeders WG.
Davis Montenegro Martinez Ph.D., Member, IEEE
Davis Montenegro-Martinez serves as Engineer/Scientist III at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in the areas of power system modeling, analysis and high performance computing. He received his degree in electronic engineering from Universidad Santo Tomás, Bogotá, Colombia (2004); he is M.Sc. in electrical engineering from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá , Colombia (2012). He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Universidad de los Andes (2015), and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University Grenoble-Alpes, France (2015).
Before joining EPRI, Davis served for 10 years as a lecturer for Universidad Santo Tomas in Colombia, during this time he was also technology consultant in the areas of industrial automation, software and electronic hardware design focused in the electric power industry specifically in monitoring and control for calibration laboratories. His expertise in parallel computing techniques is being used at EPRI for incorporating multi-core processing to power system analysis methods such as QSTS, reducing the computational time required to perform these analysis using standard computing architectures.
Hasala Dharmawardena
Coordinator for the PES YP CEP OpenDSSSWebinar Series and PES Day Region 3 lead