Special Session 13

The electric power industry relies on hundreds or even thousands of transducers as well as measurement, control and protection devices spread over a wide geographic area. As power grids evolve and include more renewable energy sources, plug-in electric vehicles, and assets behind the meter, electricity distribution networks are facing growing bidirectional power flows that introduce additional dynamics to the network, resulting in increased short-time power fluctuations, power quality issues and interactions with new entities such as aggregators. This evolving scenario requires increasingly fast, accurate and flexible measurement instruments, distributed measurement techniques, optimal placement strategies of existing equipment. Communication infrastructures able to support the exchange of large amounts of data for a variety of purposes, such as full power system observability even under contingencies, flexible power dispatching within energy communities, smart storage systems management, power quality monitoring and control, diagnostics and prognostics tools are also needed.

In this context, topics of interest of this special session include, but are not limited to:

• Latest progresses in smart energy metering techniques and load monitoring;
• Distributed measurement techniques and state estimators for power systems;
• Communication-related issues (measurement data aggregation and fusion, time synchronization, bad data management);
• Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and their applications;
• Optimal placement strategies of measurement devices in power systems;
• Real-time assessment of distribution networks’ stability and distributed energy resources on a local basis;
• Methods for fault detection and classification in distribution networks;
• Practical experiences from real-time control and data-exchange with aggregators and flexible energy resources to provide ancillary services;
• Power quality monitoring techniques;
• Energy efficiency measurement;
• Sensors for energy management systems;
• Low-cost embedded systems and smart sensors for power industry applications;
• Reliability and resilience analyses.

Erick F. Alves (S'06, M'08, SM'19) received the engineering degree in energy and automation from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2007, and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Arctic University of Norway, Narvik, Norway in 2018. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree with the Department of Electric Power Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) focusing on power quality and stability of low-inertia ac grids. He has over 15 years of experience with design, engineering, commissioning, and development of control systems for the power industry.

David Macii, received the M.S. degree in Electronics Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy, in 2000 and in 2003, respectively. He was a visiting researcher at the University of Westminster, London, UK in 2002, at the Advanced Learning and Research Institute of the University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland, between 2004 and 2005 and he was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, USA, between 2009 and 2010. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the Department of Industrial Engineering University of Trento, Italy. He is Author and Co-author of about 150 papers published in books, scientific journals, and international conference proceedings. Since 2018 he has been an Editor for the journal “Measurement”. Also he is a member of the Editorial board of the journals “Energies” and “Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks” His research interests include measurement and estimation techniques for a variety of applications, most notably in the areas of industrial electronics and power systems.

Giancarlo Marafioti, received the MSc degree in computer science engineering from the Universita’ della Calabria, Italy, and the PhD degree in engineering cybernetics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. He is currently a senior research scientist at SINTEF Digital, Department of Mathematics and Cybernetics. He was a researcher and postdoc at NTNU before the position at SINTEF. His areas of expertise are mathematical modelling, model predictive control, state and parameter estimation, embedded system prototyping, communication infrastructures. He is a member of the IEEE.

Elisabetta Tedeschi, received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from the University of Padua, Italy, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. From 2009 to 2011, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), working on the grid integration of offshore renewable energies. She was a Marie Curie Fellow at Tecnalia, Spain, between 2011 and 2013. From 2013 to 2014, she was a Research Scientist at SINTEF Energy, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at NTNU in Norway. In 2014, she became a Full Professor at the Department of Electric Power Engineering of NTNU. Since 2020, she has also been a Full Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento, Italy. She has a core competence in the design and control of energy conversion, and transmission and distribution systems, with a focus on offshore energy and power-quality issues. In such areas, she has led and/or contributed to more than 15 national and international scientific projects and she has authored or coauthored two book chapters and more than 100 journals and conference papers.