Cheng Wins NSF CAREER Award

SIE assistant professor Jianqiang Cheng recently earned the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award, the foundation’s most prestigious recognition of early-career faculty with potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

The limited predictability of wind and solar energy makes it difficult to balance large-scale supply and demand. Cheng is setting out to improve the long-term generation and real-time dispatch abilities of these uncertain systems by proactively controlling the risk of shortage. In combination, these features enable renewable energy plants to plan ahead and pivot as needed. Further, Cheng proposes a unique approach to solve the risk-averse decision making problems within practical time limitation. The key idea is to combine a statistical method called sampling, and decomposition algorithms, which break problems into many pieces that can be solved individually then combined to reach a solution.

The research results will provide electricity industry companies with new tools and methodologies to effectively manage renewable energy and thus help to ensure system reliability and cost-effectiveness.

“Renewable energy has a future, and Arizona has so much sunshine, I think we need to try to make full use of it,” he said. “I want to improve the state of the art.”