UConn engineering students conduct senior design project at ISO New England

During the 2018–2019 academic year, ISO New England partnered with the University of Connecticut (UConn) to sponsor an electrical engineering Senior Design Project. This project, for which three students received class credit, took place over eight months spread across two semesters.

The project was hosted by our System Operations team and led by Manager of Real-Time Studies Dean LaForest and engineer Joe Koltz with UConn Professor Peng Zheng. The students were tasked with examining a “pocket” of constrained generation, which consists of a very limited transmission system, a small amount of load, and a diverse mix of resources that includes significant renewables. This type of pocket can be prone to poor voltage performance, resulting in frequent generation resource constraints. The students were asked to perform a contingency analysis to determine which combinations of generation and transmission system use were reliable and which would otherwise suffer from unacceptable post-contingency voltage performance (low voltage), potential voltage collapse, or voltage/angular instability.

Members of the System Operation team with UConn students.

The body of work the UConn students completed was designed to assist ISO New England and its customers by improving the tools and data we use to operate the system reliably and cost-effectively. Students benefitted from the hands-on experience of performing technical analysis on real system data while examining complex voltage constraints in a power system.

UConn students present the results of their Senior Design Project.