Reliable and Renewable Electricity

The electric power system is poised to undergo major changes in every aspect of its vast industry over the next decade. Load demands on the electric power grid are expected to grow continuously and rapidly. Fossil fuel costs have also been increasing very quickly, making it difficult to depend on fossil fuel-based electric power generation in the long run. These two factors together imply the following trends for power systems:

• Power transfers over long transmission paths to balance loads and generations efficiently (ie. transfering bulk hydro power generation from the Northwest and Canada to distant central and southern load centers of the American grid.)
• Electric power generation from non-conventional energy sources such as wind mills and solar cells.
• Nuclear power as an option may be inevitable in the intermediate time-frame.

Additional problems for the power industry:

• An aging infrastructure. Large sets of equipment in some critical sectors, such as power system protection, may need to be revamped to keep up with future needs.
• A workforce crisis with the expected retirement in the next ten years of a majority of the experienced power engineers. 

Conversely, advances in measurement, communication and control technology in the past ten years are providing an exciting platform for revamping the monitoring, protection and control of the future power system using wide-area communication, control and protection networks.

To address these problems, the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has well-funded programs in the fields of:

• Electric power systems
• Communication networks
• Control systems

Additional Strengths:

• The Power Professorship program at WSU, established in 1974, has resulted in long-standing partnerships between WSU and the electric power industry for supporting undergraduate power education and research at WSU.
• WSU is also a member of the NSF industry-university collaborative research center called Power System Engineering Research Center (PSERC) that includes all the top power programs in the country.

• Safeguarding the Nation’s Power Grid, NSF $950K, Professors Bakken, Hauser, and Bose;
• Feasibility of Real-time Control, USDOE $650K Professors Bose, Tomsovic and Venkatasubramanian;
• Wide-Area Real-time control, Bonneville Power Administration, $400K, Professor Venkatasubramanian
• Long-term power system planning, NSF $200K,  Professors Tomsovic, Dimitrovski, and Bose,
• Distributed Sensing Network Algorithms, NSF $240K, Professors Saberi and Roy. 

Professor Anjan Bose of EECS is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. Professor Robert Olsen, also in EECS, is a leading world expert in the area of electromagnetics and high voltage engineering of power systems. In addition to the faculty listed above, other EECS faculty members with research expertise related to the center include: Professors Pedrow (high voltage engineering), Belzer (communication), and Fischer (communication), and Krishnamoorthy (signal processing). WSU also has a very strong group of faculty in the field of environmental engineering who have expertise in the area of renewable energy supplies.