Chinmay Shah Successfully Defends His Ph.D. Thesis

ACEP is excited to share that Chinmay Shah, a graduate student under the supervision of electrical engineering faculty Rich Wies, successfully defended and presented his Ph.D. dissertation titled, “Optimization & Forecasting Algorithms for Converter Dominated Distribution Networks using Blockchain and AI” on March 3, 2022. 

Shah’s work builds on the strong effort being made to increase the integration of renewable energy resources into electric power grids and, with that, the need for sophisticated algorithms to optimize the energy dispatch from these resources.  

With funding support from ACEP, the Office of Naval Research, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, UAF’s Alaska Center for Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship, and the U.S. Department of Energy, Shah dedicated his research to blockchain-based architecture for co-optimization of energy dispatch and scheduling flexibility reserves in order to reduce the impacts of renewable energy source uncertainty and enhance the flexibility of power distribution networks. 

Shah also worked to create a neutral network-based residential load forecasting algorithm that can be implemented on the edge devices. As part of his dissertation research and the development of a system for residential load forecasting with Office of Naval Research seed funding, Shah is monitoring the power usage at his graduate advisor’s home.

Wies first met Shah, who initially visited UAF in May 2017, while attending a conference in Anchorage. Wies said Shah has been a welcome addition to ACEP’s power system research team.

“It has been a pleasure to serve as his graduate advisor and to see him grow and develop into the doctoral-level researcher that he is today,” said Wies.

 

Chinmay Shah. Photo by Emily Browning.