December 02, 2019
On October 24, 2019, UCLA's Smart Grid Energy Research Center (SMERC) and UCLA Connected Autonomous Electric Vehicle (CAEV) Program hosted a Round Table Event coupled with advanced technology demonstrations by UCLA students and researchers at the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento.
URL: https://smartgrid.ucla.edu/CAEV/events/2019-10/

This event was sponsored in part by Southern California Edison.

Here are some of the opinions from SMERC participants:

Rajit Gadh, Director:
“ The workshops held were attended by local utilities, EV companies and government representatives. The discussions at these workshops resulted in new research directions for our students.”

Michael Boehm, Industry Liaison:
“ Experts on the topic joined Michael Boehm to discuss the future of the smart grid and Distributed Energy Resources, such as solar, wind, storage, EV charging, and building load.  Panelists saw EV charging as an increasingly important part of the grid and identified several strategies for managing it including driver incentives and infrastructure management.  Finally, all agreed on the importance of storage for the future of DER and the grid, with cost down for lithium-ion, alternative storage technology, and Vehicle to Grid all identified as potentially critical in cost-effective storage solutions.  ”

Basem A. Eraqi, visiting student resercher:
“ I enjoyed listening to the panel discussions about Distributed Energy Resources and Vehicle-to-Grid / Autonomous Vehicle technologies, where great speakers from both the government and private sectors discussed the current state of these technologies and where their industries are headed. Following the panels, I was able to present my research on battery degradation due to vehicle-to-grid technology utilization, I also received valuable feedback and suggestions from the workshop attendees about my research. In addition, the workshop was a great opportunity for networking with fellow researchers and professionals in the fields of transportation and electricity. ”

Yu-Wei Chung, PhD student:
“ Yu-Wei presented the research of EV-smart grid integration, including charging scheduling, EV load modeling, and cybersecurity issue. The advanced EV load modeling approach tackles the stochasticity of EV user charging behavior, thereby results in a better performance of EV charging scheduling. Besides, the potential attack vectors for an EV charging system were identified to suggest system security improvement. Furthermore, an anomaly detection method was introduced to maintain system resiliency. In response to the future trend of high EV penetration, a proper EV-grid integration not only mitigates the adverse effects of EV charging but also brings benefits to the grid in a reliable and resilient manner. ”

Jesse Cha, PhD student:
“ Jesse is a first year PhD student who recently joined the SMERC Lab. He presented his research proposal on high speed motion planning for safe autonomous driving. He demonstrated his proof of concept scaled autonomous platforms to the industry panel. Many members of the panel affirmed the benefits of exploring vehicle autonomy with scaled platforms. Through the interactive demonstration of the scaled vehicle platforms, the industry attendees were able to take a first hand glimpse of the research being spearheaded in the CAEV consortium research group. ”

Amirhossein Ahmadian, PhD student:
“ Amirhossein is a Ph.D. student at SMERC lab. His research project aims to address the impact of the electric bus (e-bus) charging infrastructure level of service and costs, and how could this be regulated efficiently. Charging infrastructure is the bottleneck for electric bus mass deployment. Therefore, this research attempts to provide insights into the choice of charging infrastructure, method, and battery specifications. In this regard, a study on available battery set-ups, charging methods, and key players in this business have been carried out.Also, based on the charging mechanisms and predefined bus routes, and electrification distributions (electric city and/or regional buses, electric BRT vehicles), an optimized scheduling framework and allocated charging stations locations with optimized battery specifications for electrical buses have to be achieved. ”