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Date:  Thu, February 21, 2019
Time:  2:00pm - 3:00pm
Location:  Holmes Hall 389
Speaker:  Dr. Liuqing Yang, Professor, Colorado State University

The high variability of solar production, especially the ramp events which refer to the sudden drop or rise of solar power, poses challenges to system stability and hence greatly limits the solar penetration into the distribution grid. To address this stability challenge, the system operator needs to acquire accurate prediction of the solar energy at very-short-term time scale in the order of minutes. However, most existing works on solar prediction are developed for medium- or short-term (days or hours) planning and scheduling. In this work, we aim to make very-short-term solar prediction in order to capture the ramp events in solar production. Given that the major factor causing the high variability in solar production is the cloud movement, we take into account the sky images provided by sky cameras. Different from the existing methods involving sky images, however, we also utilize other important meteorological data such as solar geometry, temperature, wind speed, and so on. Our proposed prediction framework incorporates all these data and is verified to capture the ramp events in solar production very well via tests and comparisons against existing alternatives. Our very-short-term solar predictor will facilitate ramp event capture and in turn effective system stability maintenance that is pivotal for high solar penetration.

Short Bio
Prof. Liuqing Yang received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, in 2004. Her main research interests include theory and application of signal processing and data analytics, subjects on which she has published more than 290 technical papers, 3 books and 3 book chapters. She received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award in 2007, the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2009, the IEEE GLOBECOM Outstanding Service Award in 2010, the George T. Abell Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Award and the Art Corey Outstanding International Contributions Award at CSU in 2012 and 2016 respectively, and Best Paper Awards at IEEE ICUWB'06, ICCC'13, ITSC'14, GLOBECOM'14, ICC'16, WCSP'16, ICCS’18 and GLOBECOM'18. She is currently the Editor in Chief for IET Communications.