Dr. Peng Zhang

Peng Zhang is a tenured Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at Stony Brook University, New York, USA. He has a joint appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a Staff Scientist in the Interdisciplinary Sciences Department. He is an affiliated Professor of Computer Science and affiliated Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University. He graduated from Shandong University, Tsinghua University, and received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada in 2009, under supervision of Professor Jose R. Marti and Professor Hermann W. Dommel. He was the Francis L. Castleman Associate Professor and Centennial Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA, from 2017 to 2019. He was a System Planning Engineer at BC Hydro and Power Authority, Canada, during 2006-2010.

Prof. Zhang completed over 30 projects for power industry, and so far has served as a PI of over 20 projects with a total of $44 million sponsored by NSF, DOE, Eversource Energy, USDA, etc. He contributed over 130 publications including over 100 papers in top journals and conferences, 26 technical reports, 2 books and 1 awarded patent. He pioneered quantum grids, networked microgrids and software-defined smart grid, and has been developing a series of technologies such as software-defined urban distribution network (SD2N), programmable microgrids, quantum-secure microgrids, and formal methods for microgrids/macrogrids.

With Prof. Marti and Prof. Dommel, Prof. Zhang established Shifted Frequency Analysis (SFA) theory which transforms an original large system into a shifted frequency system, allowing the use of large time steps to enable accurate real-time simulations. SFA has been used in the U.S. DOE's software GridLAB-D as an algorithmic engine. SFA is also a core technology that enables CloudPSS, a widely used cloud-computing platform for energy systems modeling and simulation.

Prof. Zhang was a pioneer of wind farm interconnection at BC Hydro. In 2006-2009, he planned, designed, and commissioned British Columbia's first large wind farm (Canada's first wind farm equipped with direct-drive wind generators), the 102 MW Bear Mountain Wind (BMW) Project. He provided innovative and practical solutions for BMW including frequency control, reactive power control, fault ride-through, and autonomous wind farm operation; he designed and implemented Remedial Action Schemes (RAS) for the BMW project to mitigate potential thermal overloading, instability and voltage violations. Prof. Zhang has also planned several other wind energy projects with a total capacity of 2000 MW during 2006-2009.

He made pioneering contributions to PV systems reliability in early 2010s. He devised a widely used, accurate model to quantify the PV power system reliability. He developed reliability evaluation methods of active distribution system including microgrids and high penetration PVs. He and his colleagues standardized PV MPPT testing procedures and developed fault-ride-through for PV survivability.

His Lab's software tools DER-Driven Non-Detection Zone (D2NDZ) and Extreme PV power Analytics (EPVA) have been used by Eversource and AVANGRID, helping utilities save millions of dollars in unnecessary expenditures in infrastructure hardening, and significantly increased DERPV utilization/hosting capacities in New England.

He also contributed to Underwater Wireless Power Transfer (UWPT) since 2010. He published one of the earliest journal papers on UWPT. He created the concepts of Maximum Power Efficiency Tracker (MPET) and Maximum Life Cycle Tracking (MLCT) to improve the life and efficiency of ocean energy systems.

Prof. Zhang is an Individual Member of CIGRE. He is an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, and the IEEE Power and Energy Society Letters, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

Prof. Zhang received a 2018 IEEE Region 1 Technological Innovation Award for leadership and contributions in the areas of microgrids, smart communities and cities, cyber-physical security and smart ocean systems, an Outstanding Engineer Award, IEEE Connecticut Section for years of dedicated research and valuable technical contributions to the electric power industry, and an Outstanding Young Engineer Award, IEEE Long Island Section for contributions to reliable and secure distributed energy resources and microgrids. He also received the 2018 Excellence in Energy Award by Connecticut Power & Energy Society for shaping the renewable energy landscape.