Koerner Fellowship recipient aims to make a difference in power industry

Daniel Glover has enjoyed engineering and programming but chose to focus on power engineering at Washington State University because he believes energy will be part of our national challenges for the foreseeable future.

"The energy sector is never going to go away," he said.

Glover is a recent recipient of the Koerner Family Foundation fellowship. The fellowship supports American graduate students who are conducting research and working on PhDs in engineering. In addition to Glover, WSU students Christi Webster, a graduate student in chemical engineering, and Ryan Dorosh, in mechanical engineering, are also recipients of the prestigious fellowship.

Glover grew up in Oklahoma where he spent years working as an audio engineer. Taking apart an audio console, he got his first taste of signal processing and decided to return to school, where he earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical and computer engineering. He was encouraged to apply to the power engineering program at WSU to pursue a PhD.

The energy sector is changing constantly and is more important than ever, says Glover. With the growth in data centers nationwide and fast adoption of artificial intelligence, the load growth is expected to exponentially increase over the next decade, and finding the right energy supply balance and oversight is a constant challenge.

"When you combine that with the introduction of renewables, batteries, solar, and wind, there's a lot of introduced uncertainty now when things used to be very determined," he said. "That requires faster and much more difficult decision making, so I feel like it's an important area to focus on."

In his studies working with his advisor Anamika Dubey, Glover has focused on centralized coordination of distributed energy resources for grid operators, such as solar inverters and photovoltaics, in combination with integration of safety-critical learning-based approaches.

Unlike some of the other communities … we don't have that luxury in power systems. We're dealing with a critical infrastructure that requires safety 100% of the time.

Grid operations on the distribution side and from the control room are becoming more data-centric, and there is the new age of artificial intelligence. Glover has been working to integrate and develop techniques for safety-based reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning, which are types of artificial intelligence, into grid operations.

Because the grid is a critical infrastructure and responsible for human lives, though, safety is paramount, he says. Since the AI algorithms learn from data, there can be severe consequences if researchers don't take proper precautionary steps.

"Unlike some of the other communities, like robotics and video games, where they can just take these algorithms and apply them, we don't have that luxury in power systems," he said. "We're dealing with a critical infrastructure that requires safety 100% of the time."

Glover is working to make his approach transparent for operators who may not have an engineering background and to create approaches in, for example, voltage regulation that are more robust for distributional shifting due to bad data.

"I've been working to draw some notions of the simulation-to-reality gap, which is where you develop some work in a simulator that's modeled after a real-world system … but it's not the real-world system," he said. "You've got to make sure that when you transfer that control policy to the real-world system, that there isn't something that goes terribly wrong."

Glover is excited and grateful to receive the fellowship.

"It means everything," he said. "It's an amazing opportunity to represent our program at WSU, the university and the department, and it gives some more attention to the work that we're doing."