Tasnima Naoshin, MS '24 Civil and Environmental Engineering
Graduate Fellow, Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC)
At first glance, the US electricity system comes off as hopelessly complex. Most people are familiar with their utility companies – the entities who sell you your electricity and send you the bill every month. More unfamiliar might be the entities that actually generate your power, the entities that transport it across transmission lines and substations, the entities that determine which electrons go where, and many more that each play a role in the system. One such organization is the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, or WECC – the regional entity responsible for promoting reliability and conducting compliance monitoring and enforcement in the Western Interconnection. Among other things, their job is to ensure that all of the generators in the western US (and parts of Canada and Mexico) play nice with each other and with the laws of physics – both now and in the near- or far-distant future.
The way WECC accomplishes this is through a lot of modeling. My role this summer, as part of the reliability modeling team, was to develop generic data needed to represent future solar and wind generators in WECC’s current transient stability models. Breaking that sentence down into the important bits, we have:
- transient stability models: These models can simulate the physical characteristics of how the US power grid would behave, down to the millisecond. With these models, you can answer questions like, what happens if this one generator is turned on or off? What happens if the grid experiences a huge, unexpected load?
- future solar and wind generators: The US is building a lot more renewable energy, mostly in the form of solar and wind power! Although they haven’t been built yet, these future generators need to be accurately modeled, so we can prepare for when they do come online.
- generic data: In order to have a reasonable estimate as to how future, not-yet-built generators will fit into the current electricity system, we need to develop a set of “generic data”, or reasonable assumptions for the values of different parameters that are needed to simulate the generators. This is important to make sure we have accurate predictions!
My goal with the Shultz fellowship was to get a glimpse into how an important entity in the US electricity system worked and understand the role they play. As a graduating Master’s student pursuing a career in the energy sector, I knew that the better I understood the goals and issues faced by key stakeholders, the better poised I would be to make meaningful contributions and draw useful insights at my future jobs. I had spent previous summers interning at utility companies and nonprofits engaged in clean energy advocacy, where I learned their unique perspectives. My time at WECC so far has shown me another angle of the energy industry that I had not seen much of before. From this new angle, hot topics like energy markets and policies that were key at other organizations faded out when faced with the challenge of working out the physics of almost half the country’s electricity system. Impromptu deep dives into model specifications gave me a crash course in power systems, expanding my technical knowledge, and occasional virtual coffee chats connected me with the team, despite the organization’s remote work culture.
Overall, my summer at WECC has elucidated another part of the complex US electricity system for me. Our project will enable the building of better models to prepare for future generation growth in the West, and I look forward to carrying the knowledge I’ve gained into my future growth as well.
