Team Led by Prof. Fu Wins Big
September 18, 2020
The Department of Energy’s Grid Optimization (GO) Competition is a battleground for power system engineers, software engineers, and cyber security experts. The 2020 GO competition managed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) saw several teams battle for the net prize of $3.4M. The prize monies can be utilized to further advance the team’s technologies to be field ready for adoption.
Prof. Fu’s team, called YongOptimization, was placed among the top 10 finishers and will share the net prize – approximately $300K.
Today’s power grid is becoming more diverse and integrated with high-level distributed energy resources and smart control technologies that is creating a new set of grid management challenges in terms of large-scale, nonlinear, and non-convex problem modeling, complex and time-consuming computation, as well as difficult uncertainty handling.
Dr. Fu, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Mississippi State University stated that “the idea is to explore distributed optimization algorithms for complex and realistic power system models, and develop fast, efficient, and robust grid optimization solutions on high-performance computing platform that will significantly increase power grid economy, flexibility, and resilience.”
“The success of our team’s technologies in the GO Competition will lead us to pursue more industry collaborations and is encouraging more intelligent students to get involved in such great software development for a wide range of real-world power system applications”, said Dr. Fu.
“This is a great moment for the ECE Department, the University, and especially Dr. Fu. We are all so proud of his achievements. He has been a leader in his field and continues to shine bright”, stated Dr. Khan, the Department Head of ECE.
For more information see the official announcement by ARPA-E.
For more information about Prof. Fu, please visit his webpage.