Topic of the Speech：Opportunities for Carbon Emissions Reduction in the Electric Power Sector

Professor Saifur Rahman is the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute at Virginia Tech, USA where he is the Joseph R. Loring professor of electrical and computer engineering. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE Millennium Medal winner.  He was the 2023 IEEE President & CEO. He was the President of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) for 2018 and 2019. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Electrification Magazine and the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. He has published over 160 journal papers and has made over seven hundred conference and invited presentations. He is a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Power & Energy Society and has lectured on renewable energy, energy efficiency, smart grid, energy internet, blockchain, IoT sensor integration, etc. in over 30 countries.  He served as the chair of the US National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for International Science and Engineering from 2010 to 2013. He has led several research projects for Duke Energy, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of Energy and the State of Virginia. He has a PhD in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech.

 This lecture explains what carbonization is, addresses its causes and impacts. It then offers technological solutions to reduce CO2 emissions from the electric power sector which is responsible over 30% of global Carbon emissions. In order to address the reduction of carbon emissions from the electric power sector, a collaborative approach between the industrialized nation states and emerging economies is necessary. This will involve a portfolio of solutions with low-carbon generation from wind, solar, hydro and nuclear, storage, cross-border power transfer and advanced technology focusing on energy efficiency. This talk also discusses the IEEE Climate Change program and related activities.

Topic: Theoretical Foundation of Frequency Domain Impedance Analysis of Wide Band Oscillations

Dr. Yi Zhang joined RTDS Technologies Inc. in 2000, where he now serves as Vice-President R&D and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He has over 30 years of experiences working in power system simulation and analysis. His expertise includes Real Time EMT Simulation, Voltage Stability and HVDC, etc. As a principal member of the RTDS development team, he developed many simulation models on RTDS Real Time Simulator in the past 23 years. At present, Dr. Zhang leads the research and development activities in RTDS Technologies. He is an active member in multiple CIGRE B4 working groups and chairs the IEEE PES taskforce on “EMT Simulation of Large Power Systems”. He also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Manitoba Canada and Hunan University China, and an editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery. Dr. Zhang is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of Engineering Institute of Canada and a registered professional engineer in the province of Manitoba.

This presentation comprehensively discussed various domain transformations in wide band oscillation stability analysis, and explained the intrinsic relationship between various domains (dq0, PN0, Sequence, etc.). Based on this basis, the mathematical roots of frequency coupling that occurs in frequency scanning of power electronic circuits are discovered. This research expanded and consolidated the theoretical basis of wide-band oscillation frequency domain impedance analysis. The ideas and implementation techniques of wide-band oscillation analysis software developed on a real-time simulation system are introduced. The presentation attempts to clarify some difficult but essential concepts in wide-band oscillation analysis of power systems in simple language, hoping to enhance the audience's understanding of this complex phenomenon and its analysis tools.

Topic: Towards Ideal Fault Current Breaking: Series-Type Hybrid Circuit Breaker (S-HCB) for DC and AC Grid Protection

Dr. John Shen is a professor and director of the School of Mechatronics at Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada. He has more than 34 years of industrial, academic, and entrepreneurial experience in power electronics and power semiconductor devices with around 380 publications and 21 issued U.S. patents in these areas. He has been involved in circuit breaker research since 2013, and co-edited a book on Direct Current Fault Protection (Springer 2023). He served as the General Chair of the 2016 Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE2016) and the 2018 International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices & IC’s (ISPSD2018). He is a Fellow of IEEE and the U.S. National Academy of Inventors.

Ultrafast and low-loss circuit breakers are needed for protecting modern DC and AC power grids. Conventional solid-state circuit breakers (SSCB) or hybrid circuit breakers (HCB) are unlikely to meet the challenges. We propose a new concept termed Series-Type Hybrid Circuit Breaker (S-HCB) that offers an on-resistance similar to that of conventional parallel-type HCBs and a µs-scale response time even faster than SSCBs. This talk will explore a variety of S-HCB designs that can be used for protecting both DC and AC power grids.