WELCOME
from
The Director
Kevin Tomsovic
It is time once again to update you on recent activities in CURENT. This bi-annual publication is one of the
ways we inform our members, peers and stakeholders about significant achievements, upcoming events and
related activities. As we approach the mid-point of our third year, we want to showcase the value of “Centertype” research - a research model where we bring a diverse group of researchers, students and industry
leaders together to focus on comprehensively addressing a challenging problem. A key objective this year is to
demonstrate closed-loop wide area controls for voltage and frequency. We will have several demonstrations of
the developed concepts on our large scale test-bed and hardware test-bed at this year’s Industry Meeting and
Site Visit (don’t forget to mark your calendar for May 13-15th!). Some results of the demonstration projects
are detailed in this Newsletter.
Another way we want to highlight the Center value proposition is to continue to increase engagement with
our industry partners. We are approaching this not only through the monthly project reviews but through our
co-sponsorship of industry meetings, in particular, the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI),
which will be held in Knoxville March 11-12th. We also invite you to join us for a reception on the evening of
March 11th in our nearby facilities. Additionally, we are expanding offerings of short courses and training in
collaboration with industry. Finally, our progress to date has helped us land additional funding to address Data
Architecture and Analytics issues for wide area controls. This is a natural and important extension of our work
to date. We will be reporting more on those efforts later this year. As always, let us know if there are ways that
we can continue to improve CURENT.
Best Wishes,
Kevin Tomsovic
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