ECSE Team Wins U.S. Department of Energy Inaugural American-Made Digitizing Utilities Prize 

Posted April 20, 2023
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Congratulations to Prof. Joe Chow, Dr. Christoph Lackner and Dr. Denis Osipov, who make up the winning Red Hawks team.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Office of Electricity (OE) announced the nine Phase 1 winners of the inaugural American-Made Digitizing Utilities Prize, including the RPI team the Red Hawks.

This $675,000 prize – $75,000 for each team – connects utilities with interdisciplinary teams of software developers and data experts to transform digital systems in the energy sector through data analytics, processing, quality assurance, storage, and deletion.   

The goal of their proposal is to develop analytics using synchrophasor and point on wave data for various tasks related to asset diagnostics and control system performance evaluation. Our team has over 30 years combined experience working with synchhrophasor data in academic settings and utility industry. Some noticeable accomplishments include a Cross Spectral Density method for locating oscillations, which placed first at the 2021 IEEE NASPI Oscillation Source Location Contest.

Joe H. Chow is an Institute Professor of Engineering in Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering. He is also the Campus Director for NSF/DOE CURENT ERC (Center for Ultra-wide-area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks) and the Editor for Springer Power Electronics and Power Systems Series.

Christoph Lackner is Operating Officer at Grid Protection Alliance (GPA). He has been with GPA for over 5 years, leading GPA’s Grid Solutions division including efforts to develop and deploy synchrophasor based wide-area measurement systems (WAMS) in the electric utility industry and support utilities in getting maximum value out of their data through online and offline analytics. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in 2016 and 2019, respectively. 

Denis Osipov is Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interests include power system dynamics, control, stability, and monitoring, renewable energy resources. He received the B.Sc., M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering and the Specialist degree in Computer Science from Donetsk National Technical University in Ukraine.  He worked as an instructor at Donetsk National Technical University for 8 years. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the USA in 2018. 

For more information on the award, see here.