HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — Electrical engineering professor Lingling Fan leads a team of electrical engineering students in USF’s Smart Grid Power Systems Laboratory.
“What we do is that we can do a lot of computer simulations for power grids,” said Fan.
Her lab is full of high-performance supercomputers.
Using these, Fan and her students run simulations to examine the performance of power grids because during a hurricane, trees can fall and trip power lines, causing major outages.
“As a power grid, we want to make the system very safe even if you trip a line,” said Fan.
She uses simulations to evaluate how many people are impacted by outages and double-check power restoration plans for electric companies to make sure that everything can run smoothly in the event of a storm.
"Because once the entire grid is off, and we want to restart a generator, the sequence has to be double-checked in a computer simulation. Because the grid is not just an energy supply. It has to be synchronous. There are lots of devices working together. All these require computer simulation,” said Fan.
“Those are very high voltage, high power. It’s almost impossible to conduct in the field. Therefore today, in the current day, simulation has been very popular to be used in the grid industry,” she added.
Fan’s work is just a small part of a larger effort statewide to straighten grid systems.
Duke Energy prepares year-round for hurricane season.
Since 2021, they’ve upgraded more than 16,000 power poles, including 28 newly installed concrete poles in St. Petersburg.
“That’s all part of our storm hardening work and work to strengthen our grid and strengthen our system against severe weather like hurricanes,” said Audrey Stasko, Spokesperson for Duke Energy Florida.
The goal of this work is to reduce the number of outages, reduce the amount of time people experience an outage and improve power reliability.
“These poles are designed to be less susceptible to damage from high winds, flying debris from severe weather,” said Stasko.
Although teams of people statewide are working on different aspects of strengthening grids, experts want to remind people that there is no such thing as perfect power.
“Plan ahead. Prepare for extended outages. But this work absolutely is improving reliability and resiliency for our customers,” said Stasko.
