Julia Belk
MIT EECS — Duke Energy Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar
Control of Electrical Networks to Enable Peer-to-Peer Energy Sharing
2015–2016
David J. Perreault
Today, roughly 1.3 billion people do not have reliable access to electricity. To provide power in a decentralized, scalable, and inexpensive manner, we are developing a dc microgrid which allows individual communities to be electrically connected and trade power amongst themselves. Our microgrid has been demonstrated in India with basic functionality, but on critical feature which must be implemented before the technology can be deployed at scale is the ability to connect multiple power generators to the network. My project is to design and implement a control strategy which will allow multiple generators to cooperate when connected to the same grid, meaning that the rated network voltage (24 V) is maintained and the fraction of total power that each generator supplies can be controlled.
Having access to electricity has had a positive impact on my life, and I think that making electricity available to everyone is an important issue and a fantastic opportunity to use the engineering knowledge that I have been accumulating in the classroom