UPR Mayagüez gets $375K to advance smart grid technologies
The National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR), which is tasked with promoting scientific progress in the U.S., announced it has granted $374,882 to the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez to develop a proposal to advance smart grid technologies.
The university will work jointly with the jurisdictions of Maine, Alaska, South Dakota on the proposed research. Education and workforce development activities will advance U.S. smart grid technologies to support communities disproportionately impacted by climate change and related severe weather such as hurricanes, blizzards, flooding and rapid shifts in temperature, explained the NSF, which is an independent federal agency.
The project known as “RII Track-2 FEC: STORM: Data-Driven Approaches for Secure Electric Grids in Communities Disproportionately Impacted by Climate Change” (STORM) will benefit from experts in electrical, computer and civil engineering, economics, community and environmental resilience, climatology, and mathematics and statistics, the NSF EPSCoR stated.
“Faculty and students will co-produce knowledge with community stakeholders, using convergent approaches that are critical to solving complex problems,” according to the proposal, which names five investigators: principal investigator Adriana Luna-Hernández and co-principal investigators Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo, Agustín Irizarry, Fabio Andrade and Alicia Barriga.
Research and workforce development objectives are built around three themes: Engagement of underserved communities in local climate change solutions and knowledge translation for microgrid design; Improvement of power grid resilience in underserved communities through accelerated big data modeling, estimation and secure control frameworks; and development of regionally relevant cyber-physical research infrastructure for studying community engaged data-driven operation of power grids.
The University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, is “one of the top producers of Hispanic engineers in the United States of America according to the American Society of Engineering Education,” NSF EPSCoR noted.
