Doctoral student receives best paper award

For the second year in a row, South Dakota State University doctoral student Shuchen Huang had her research writings chosen as one of the best papers submitted to the general meeting of the Power and Energy Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

As a result, she was able to give a nine-minute presentation to some 200 scientists and advanced scholars at the group’s annual meeting in Seattle July 23. More than 1,500 papers are submitted each year, with 60 to 80 papers in a variety of categories earning best paper designation, Huang said.

Huang is her second year of doctoral studies at SDSU. Her adviser is Junjian Qi, the Harold C. Hohbach Endowed Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering. Both Huang and Qi arrived at SDSU in August 2023 from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, where Huang had been a Ph.D. student for two years.

Huang’s paper dealt with what can happen when wind power is added to the electrical grid.

She explained that the controls used on generators for renewable energy (wind and solar) are more sensitive than those for electrical generation through coal, natural gas and hydro. As a result, there have been rare instances of cascading failures due to voltage dips and electromagnetic disturbances, she said.

Two of the most notable were in South Australia in 2016 and in the United Kingdom in 2019.

Model for power systems with wind generation 

Huang’s research created a realistic computer simulation model to investigate the impact of the increasing wind power integration. It compared the system resiliency under 30% renewable energy and 50% renewable energy. The research found that rates of cascading failure with more than 10 line outages are five times more likely with the higher renewable generation. 

Also, it found that with a 20% increase of wind power, following the failure of the line with the highest trip rate, the number of wind turbine tripping increases by 60%.

Huang said her computer simulation created a more realistic model than was previously available by including tripping of the wind turbine as well as transmission line outages.

“We also added a lot of control strategies, including load shedding and generation redispatch, included in the model,” Huang said. “It mimicked the load shedding that would occur in an actual outage.” When the transmission system detects a too low frequency, it will automatically cut the electrical load being carried to forestall a system collapse.

Generation redispatch is a practice that eliminates overloading on transmission lines by changing how much power each generator outputs, Huang said.

Looking for career in research

She said her project evolved from a class she took at SDSU as a doctoral student that dealt with renewable energy impacts on the power system. “My adviser gave me ideas and provided me the guidance that I really need when I got stuck in my research. I could not achieve this award without his help,” Huang said.

Adviser Qi said, “Shuchen has done some very high-quality research that could help improve power system resilience and eventually keep the lights on.”

Huang hopes to complete her doctoral studies in December 2025 and then find a job with a utility company or a national research lab that would allow her to continue her research in this area.

She was joined at the conference by fellow doctoral student Lei Wang, who also submitted a paper that dealt with modeling for the power system.