Energy Prize Research Articles

HAPiGYM

The HAPiGYM is a collection of numerical and experimental modelling environments for testing control of wave energy converters (WECs). It has two applications: rapid prototyping of the control policies themselves, and co-design of control and other WEC subsystems. This collection will grow over time. Initially two environments (‘GYM machines’) will be offered. These will be described in this paper.
 The HAPiGYM addresses several technical and resourcing challenges surrounding control prototyping and co-design. Time, money, and cross-disciplinary knowledge are common barriers. Tank time can be prohibitively expensive. Hence many control researchers rely on numerical simulations, and many WEC developers use non-representative control models when designing the hydrodynamic absorbers. The state of the art in hydrodynamic models are not suitable for rapid control prototyping: they are either too slow or insufficiently accurate, leading to a ‘Sim2Tank’ gap, where simulation and tank trial results disagree. Hardware-in-the-Loop removes thosemodelling uncertainties associated with the drive train and control hardware. However, uncertainties associated with the hydrodynamic model remain, and unrepresentative artefacts associated with the rig could be added. Two notable schemes that included tank testing for comparative evaluation were WECCCOMP and the Wave Energy Prize (WEP). WECCCOMP allowed participants to compare the performance of their controllers on the same tank test model. The WEP allowed participants to test their own WECs and controllers.Both had metrics that were proxies for levelised cost of energy. The single metric and prescribed methodology focused the efforts and objectives of participants. As a consequence, simplifications inherent in metrics (e.g., the formula for electrical power) and methodology (e.g., spectral parameters of the sea state available as inputs to the control policy) led to control approaches that could not be replicated in real seas, i.e., certain types of control were able to exploit the ‘Tank2Sea’ gap. The HAPiGYM approach acknowledges theissues surrounding Sim2Tank and Tank2Sea gaps. Rather than attempting to eliminate these, participants will be invited to contribute to a discussion of how testing methodology interacts with control. Participants will be able to suggest methods, metrics, and even future GYM machines. The HAPiGYM will offer a selection of settings for each GYM machine, including the resource (waves), type of PTO, and metrics. Participants will be able to rate their controllers against a suite of metrics and experimental set-ups. This will allow a more nuanced comparison between controllers. It will also facilitate more basic research on co-design, e.g. how PTO operational rangeimpacts control and hydrodynamic performance. 
 Stakeholder engagement identified the need for a simple environment to get started on (a small Sim2Tank gap), and a more challenging environment that reflected the control problems of commercial devices (a small Tank2Sea gap). The first two GYM machines offered will use the same buoy with different constraints: constrained to heave only, and unconstrained (6 DoF). Participants will be able to run Processor-in-the-Loop tests using a tank-calibrated rig simulation running on Open-Hardware controllers. The most promising projectswill be given free remote-access to the HAPiGYM, running in the FloWave tank.

Cost investigation of battery-supercapacitor hybrid energy storage system for grid-connected hourly dispatching wave energy converter power

This study demonstrates a successful application of a dispatching scheme for a slider-crank wave energy converter (WEC), utilizing a battery-supercapacitor hybrid energy storage system (HESS). The six sea states employed in the U.S. Department of Energy's Wave Energy Prize are incorporated to calculate the desired hourly grid reference power. The proposed architecture is responsible for fulfilling this grid demand in each dispatching period within an acceptable confidence level. A low pass filter is deployed to distribute the power between the supercapacitor and battery to exploit their benefits in the HESS configuration.Furthermore, several control techniques utilizing the supercapacitor state of charge (SOC) have been devised to predict the grid reference power accurately for each dispatching horizon. The techniques were applied to ensure that the energy storage system finishes each dispatching period with sufficient capacity for next-day operation (approximately 80 % SOC).The ESS life cycle expenditure is minimized based on three key factors: the best SOC algorithm, the best filter time constant, and the best depth of discharge (DOD) usage. The HESS was found to be the most cost-effective (2.6 ¢/kWh) for the WEC application under these conditions: a 100 ms filter time constant with a step-rules algorithm as a primary SOC controller, a 44 % DOD usage for the battery, and a 50 % DOD usage for the supercapacitor (SC). The HESS was also found to be less expensive than the battery-only (8.4 ¢/kWh) as well as the SC-only (2.8 ¢/kWh) cases. It is also noticeable that the SC calendar aging cost (61 %) and the battery cycling cost (96 %) contributed significantly to its overall HESS expenses for dispatching WEC power. Extensive MATLAB/Simulink simulations were performed to provide a realistic economic evaluation for WEC dispatching power.

IEEE IAS Member Kaushik Rajashekara Received the 2022 Global Energy Prize [Awards

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <i>Kaushik Rajashekara</i> </b> , professor of engineering at the University of Houston, United States, has won the prestigious Global Energy Prize for outstanding contributions to transportation electrification and energy efficiency technologies while reducing power generation emissions.

Special issue on all‐electric and hybrid‐electric flight

Special issue on all‐electric and hybrid‐electric flight

Prof. Rajashekara Wins the 2022 Global Energy Prize [Society News

Prof. Kaushik Rajashekara, distinguished professor of engineering at the University of Houston (UH), Houston, TX, USA, and IEEE Life Fellow, has been awarded the prestigious Global Energy Prize for 2022 for his outstanding contributions to transportation electrification and energy efficiency technologies while reducing power generation emissions. He is one of three laureates (two from the USA and one from Russia) announced by the Global Energy Association in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, in July. Unlike previous years, nominations this year were a record high at 119 nominations from 43 countries. The award ceremony will take place during the “Latin America in Global Energy Symposium” in Montevideo, Uruguay, 24–25 October 2022.

Joint IEEE IAS/PELS Singapore SBC Presents Global Energy Prize Lecture [Society News

Presents information on the joint IEEE IAS/PELS Singapore SBC Presents Global Energy Prize Lecture.

Visualizing Energy Participation: A Method for Practitioners and Researchers

Through our analysis of the data generated by 12 communities in the Georgetown University Energy Prize—a US-wide effort to increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions—we present a widely useable method to create visual maps of participation in energy projects. These maps, which show the breadth (who participated), depth (how), and objects (issue) of participation, can summarize large amounts of information on participation in just a few visualizations. For this study, these maps describe how communities organized to decrease the consumption of gas and electricity at the municipal and residential levels during the prize. Our results show that broader and deeper participation would not always lead to greater energy savings. Thus, instead of blindly aiming for higher participation to achieve better outcomes, results suggest that breadth, depth and objects of participation must be strategized based on the context and possibilities of the community, as well as the goals of the project. Maps do not only add transparency in decision-making processes by disclosing the who, how and on what of participation, but also facilitate the comparison of participatory efforts across process, communities and time. While the maps visualized participation that occurred in the past, the framework and method can be customized and used by governments, planners, community stakeholders, etc. in understanding, mapping and strategizing ongoing future participatory efforts in energy projects. Our instrument offers a flexible framework to plan, implement, evaluate, and research participatory interventions past, present and future.

IEEE PELS President Wins Prestigious Global Energy Prize Award [Society News

IEEE PELS President Wins Prestigious Global Energy Prize Award [Society News

The Global Energy Association and the perspectives of future development of the energy sector within the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Global Energy Association is the organizer of the Global Energy Prize Summit. The Association also performs a number of programmes for young scientists around the world. The activities of the Association are aimed at ensuring the effective development of energy in the future. New technologies are important as much as the old ones, but the most important thing is to find the way of balancing them. Renewable energy sources are playing a crucial role in the energy sector right now and new methods of using them are emerging. The world is going through the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Ongoing discussions on the topic of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and especially digitalisation of the energy sector showed that the latter is developing in two directions. First, modern technologies allow calculating the necessary amounts of energy to be obtained from renewable energy sources, taking into account the inconsistency of electricity supply to the network. Second, digital systems can predict consumer demand for energy, which is extremely difficult to accurately calculate given the development of the private energy sector.

The Fall and Rise of Gravity Storage Technologies

Download : Download high-res image (146KB) Download : Download full-size image Aaron Fyke has spent over 20 years creating and investing in successful energy technology companies. Aaron was the founder and CEO of Energy Cache, CEO of Edisun Heliostats, and is currently the co-founder of Energy Vault, creating the ubiquitous adoption of renewable energy. Aaron has been an adjunct lecturer at USC, Director of Energy Prize Development for the X PRIZE Foundation, a Partner at Starfish Ventures, and Managing Director of Thin Line Capital, investing in energy and sustainability solutions. Aaron earned his MBA and MSME at MIT and his BEng from the University of Victoria. He is a Professional Engineer in California.

Research and Development of a Power Monitoring System for the Sustainable Energy Management System Implementation at Green School, Bali, Indonesia

Green School Bali, an international school which provides education for sustainability through entrepreneurial learning and natural environment won the Zayed Future Energy Prize for developing the new renewable energy projects. Currently, Green School is supported by 2 main power sources which come from Indonesian State Electricity Company (PLN) and Photovoltaics (PV) system electricity with power reach 23.1 kW and 21.6 kWp respectively. Both of the sources are distributed to the load based on the manual balancing and daily manual switching, which create the unbalanced load and high power loss. The key to achieving sustainable energy management is the availability of accurate measurement, recording, and analysis system of the power quality in the whole buildings. To meet the requirement of the sustainable energy management system at Green School, the monitoring system of the power and energy at Green School is developed. This system contains 2 data loggers and an Internet of Things (IoT) platform. The fixed data logger provides routine measurement and recording of power quality at the PLN meter, whereas the portable data logger provides the same function for each electricity panel. The monitoring system and human interface system integrate the intelligent humanmachine interface to an Ubidots platform and completed with online and offline data storage. This system is useful for supporting the sustainable energy management goal of Green School and the daily energy practitioner’s work with providing a proper advance power monitoring system that has low cost and compatible with Green School system’s demand. This project will also be used as a platform and teaching tool for students to develop similar projects and learn about IoT and cloud-based monitoring solutions with other measurements in the classroom.

Framework to Assess City-scale Sustainability

This paper establishes the need to act at a city scale to reduce energy use and improve sustainability in general. The paper evaluates the plans that the City of Fargo (Climate zone 6), North Dakota has established to grow in a sustainable manner. As part of this effort, the City of Fargo is participating in the Georgetown University Energy Prize Competition to reduce the energy use of residential and municipal buildings. As such, the City is engaged in assessing, defining, designing and implementing the Go 2030 plan (2012) as the basis for a sustainable future. This paper reviews and evaluates several methods of city-scale assessments and identifies distinguishing characteristics of these tools and assessments and creates a categorization to make the methods ordered and understandable. The two broad categories developed are (1) category- and (2) indicator-based models of urban sustainability. Further, this paper reviews the tools through a literature search and compares the City of Fargo's Go 2030 plan against these categorizations. Based on this evaluation this paper proposes a framework that has the potential to fill the gaps in the current Go2030 plan.

Prof. François Englert

The Belgian theoretical particle physicists François Baron Englert is the 2013 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics and is currently Professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. He is also affiliated with the School of Physics and Astronomy of Tel Aviv University, Israel and the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University, USA. Prof. Englert was awarded many notable awards, such as the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2010, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004 and the High Energy and Particle Prize of the European Physical Society in 1997. Peter W. Higgs and he were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 for "the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles."

“We believe the gearbox is the best solution…”

In the last few years the good name of Vestas has been mired in plant closures, profit warnings and turbine failures. But could things be on the up? Good news arrived in the shape of the Zayed Future Energy Prize – awarded to Vestas at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. This has helped Vestas kick back in the PR battle, as has the announcement of a new 7MW offshore turbine, and wind power consumer label ( see page 10 ). David Hopwood interviews Vestas ceo Ditlev Engel.

Legislator Wants NSF to Offer $1 Billion Energy Prize

Could a $1 billion prize offered by the National Science Foundation help end the U.S. addiction to foreign oil? Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) thinks it might. (Read more.)