Distributed Energy Resources

Image credit: DOE Loan Programs Office

Distributed energy resources (DERs) are controllable electrical devices that plug in at the edge of the power grid, typically through buildings. DERs — such as electric vehicles, heating and cooling equipment, energy storage systems, and rooftop solar photovoltaics — will play an increasingly important role in future energy systems that decarbonize, digitalize, and decentralize their operations. In this class, students will learn to model a variety of DERs, optimize DER designs, and control DERs to reduce costs, pollution, and impacts on the power grid. This class will involve a mix of coding and mathematical analysis. Students will do semester projects on current DER topics.

Flyer

Syllabus

Schedule

Discord

Lecture slides

  1. Introduction
  2. Energy, electricity, and DERs
  3. Linear ordinary differential equations (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  4. Linear dynamical systems
  5. Batteries and electric vehicles (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  6. Solar energy (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  7. Buildings, part 1
  8. Buildings, part 2
  9. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  10. Thermal storage and water heaters (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  11. Modeling summary
  12. Optimization overview (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  13. Regression
  14. Convex sets and functions (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  15. Solving convex optimization problems (with blanks unfilled / filled)
  16. DER objectives
  17. Battery examples

Lecture videos

Please see Brightspace for this semester’s videos.

Blog

Homework

  1. ODEs and dynamical systems
  2. Batteries and electric vehicles
  3. Solar energy
  4. Buildings
  5. HVAC and thermal storage
  6. Optimization

Code

  1. Simple climate model (linearization, time discretization)
  2. Electric vehicles (dynamics, charging policies)
  3. Solar energy (solar angles, surface irradiance, net metering)
  4. Buildings (thermal dynamics, heating/cooling policies)
  5. Water heaters (dynamics, charging policies)
  6. Optimization (gradient descent, line search)
  7. LaTeX introduction (equations, sketches, figures, tables)

Midterm exam scheduling poll

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Archives from past semesters