AGI-ESIC FA26 Power Seminar: Increasing Grid Utilization Through Stochastic Operating Envelopes and Asset-Aware Controls

About the event

Advanced Grid Institute (AGI) presents a Power seminar, entitled, “Increasing Grid Utilization Through Stochastic Operating Envelopes and Asset-Aware Controls” by Dr. Shiva Poudel, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Overview:
Distribution grids often have more usable capacity than is conventionally recognized, yet worst-case planning assumptions and static operating limits can unnecessarily restrict utilization and trigger premature infrastructure upgrades. As electrification, data centers, and distributed energy resources (DER) adoption increase, there is a growing need to safely extract more capacity from existing assets while maintaining acceptable levels of operational risk. This seminar will present a stochastic framework for computing Dynamic Operating Envelopes that captures uncertainty in grid conditions and enables more flexible DER import and export limits. It will also discuss large-scale optimal power flow-based analysis for quantifying asset-aware load-bearing capacity and identifying how much additional load can be accommodated without unnecessary infrastructure expansion. Finally, the talk will highlight how AWS cloud services can enable the millions of simulations required for these large-scale stochastic and optimization-based assessments.

Bio:
Dr. Shiva Poudel is a Power Systems Research Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he has worked since 2020. His research focuses on power distribution system modeling and simulation, resilience and restoration, distributed energy resource coordination, risk-aware grid analysis, and emerging AI-enabled applications for power grid operation and control. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Washington State University in 2020.