Since its inception in 2004, CFES has established itself as a leader in nurturing New York's energy industry. We are proud to offer access to some of the world’s leading experts in areas that range from electrical energy storage and thermal energy conversion to systems integration and smart grid.
Research activities at CFES are organized around three broad themes:
- Distributed Energy Resources
- Energy Efficiency
- Distributed System Platforms (Smart Grids)
Distributed Energy Resources
The area of distributed energy resources (DER) includes distributed generation from renewable sources, energy storage, demand management, and microgrids. CFES expertise in this area includes the development and characterization of new materials and devices for energy conversion, conditioning, and storage, as well as system applications of these technologies.
With the rapid development of renewable energy and energy storage technologies in recent years, we believe that there will be increasing demand for improving the reliability and lifetime performance of solar, wind, and energy storage devices, as well as safely integrating these devices into the power grid. CFES research is well-structured to address these issues.
Research Areas
- Full-spectrum PV, PV performance degradation, and reliability
- Active flow control to improve wind turbine efficiency and reliability
- New materials development and application for batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells
- Power electronics for solar, wind, and energy storage application
- Control, grid integration, and management of DER
- Grid interconnect requirements and test procedures for DER
Energy Efficiency
Energy efficiency is a major priority at the state and federal level. CFES’s core research in advanced materials and power electronics is applied directly to improve the efficiency of building designs, HVAC controls, LED drivers, motor drives, and power supplies for computing and communications applications.
Research Areas
- Solid-state lighting
- High-efficiency materials and drivers
- Variable speed drives and machines
- HVAC and smart controls for buildings
- Energy-efficient building architectures
- Novel thermoelectric materials
- Wide-bandgap power semiconductor devices and structures
- Vibration energy harvesting
- Chemical and biochemical process efficiencies
Distributed System Platforms
The utility as a distributed system platform (DSP) in the future will integrate DER into grid planning and operation, and will increasingly rely on DER to maintain system reliability. Grid operation and control will incorporate more distributed functions—enabling DER to support grid stability and power quality.
Modeling and simulation will become an indispensable tool for DPS system development, and advanced monitoring and actuation functions are required to improve the resiliency of our century-old transmission and distribution network.
With core expertise in power system modeling and control, power electronics, large-scale modeling and simulation, networks, and communication, CFES is uniquely positioned to tackle these challenges of the future grid.
Research Areas
- Phasor measurement unit (PMU) and application in power systems
- Wide-area control based on PMU measurement
- Power system state estimation, cyber security
- DER system stability and power quality
- High-voltage DC transmission
- Flexible AC transmission
- Large-scale power system modeling and simulation
- Real-time and hardware-in-the-loop simulation