Power System Engineering is my major, which is an academic field that covers all technical processes like generation, transmission and consumption of electric energy, essential for our secure and prosperous society and life. This laboratory has already published abundant research achievements and, by using them as analysis tools, further studies for novel technologies are being conducted to make the best use of renewable energy. One of the strong points of this laboratory lies in the development of effective analysis tools; for example, “Critical Trajectory Method” is no other analysis technique than this in the world. Another point is that, by fully utilizing the accumulation of developed methods, we study on “broad” research themes ranging from  entire country-wide problems of bulk power system to small-scale microgrid, pursuing optimality of construction, operation and control to realize smart systems.

At this time, we are systematically reforming the past achievements to build a general-purpose analysis tool with adding new functions to tackle problems for next generation environment. For example, “Supply and Demand Control Manager” (Figure) is a systematized package of software consisting of PV output forecast, unit commitment, real-time operation and control, which can be used for various studies on the enhancement of stability and security of the system to avoid blackout.

At the same time, a novel inverter is being developed that can exert stabilization function for promoting our “smartization” research for mass introduction of renewable energies. This is a small-sized inverter for household level use but is based on a kind of greedy concept like “chasing two rabbits” to realize both of two epoch-making functions in normal and/or emergency states. The inverter can help increase stability and reliability of bulk power system in a normal state while it can enable to build a microgrid as a local power supply system in an emergency state of blackout. We already have built a hardware test bed to carry out further studies concerned with the construction of smart grid.

We believe that the effective combination of the software and hardware approaches will provide the solution of future energy problems.

Members and PV panels

Supply and Demand Control Manager & Synchronizing-power Inverters