Get to know the researchers: Rabab Haider

Rabab Haider was a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, advised by UI-ASSIST team member Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy. Haider completed her master’s and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in 2020 and 2023 respectively.

Haider’s next job will be as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the AI4Opt Institute and the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

“[I] developed a physics-aware distributed coordination architecture for grid-edge devices, which supports the integration of a large number of distributed devices across ownership boundaries (i.e. customer-owned devices). The architecture models the power physics of the underlying distribution grid and various distributed energy resources (DERs),” Haider said.

The architecture she developed will lead to contributions in themes three, six and seven of the UI-ASSIST project. Theme three of UI-ASSIST is “Energy Storage, modeling and optimal management.” As a part of that, Haider helped develop some technology that helps with storage.

“Upon the architecture we develop[ed] a load ramp mitigation service to coordinate the actions of distributed storage resources to provide aggregated support at the bulk/transmission level. This service uses customer-owned batteries to reduce the ‘duck curve’ effect of high solar penetration regions like in California,” Haider said.

Theme six of UI-ASSIST is “DSO Functions/Energy Management, Forecasting, MMS, ADMS, Control/ Optimizations and Planning.” For this theme, Haider helped with energy regulation and devices.

“Upon the architecture, we also develop a hierarchical coordination approach for voltage regulation to coordinate slow-timescale utility-owned devices with fast-timescale solar generation towards managing grid voltages. Our approach allows utilities to keep the lights on steady (i.e. by managing grid voltages, an essential task in distribution grids) and support DER integration into the grid. Our distributed optimization approach coordinates small-scale solar resources to provide essential voltage support throughout the day, thereby reducing the operational burden on devices like LTCs and capacitor banks which are expensive to operate,” Haider said.

Theme seven of UI-ASSIST is “DSO-Market and Regulatory Issues.” Part of Haider’s research was figuring out the market and retail aspects of energy storage.

“The same architecture provides the technology substrate upon which we propose a retail electricity market mechanism. The distributed optimization algorithm simultaneously coordinates DER actions and determines a retail electricity price for power generation and loads. The retail price, called a distribution-level Locational Marginal Price (d-LMP) is a time-varying and location-specific price which reflects grid conditions and provides a true value of the power being injected or drawn,” Haider said.

Haider has been a part of several collaborative efforts between the US and India, across the energy storage, DSO functions/management and market and regulatory issues space. She has worked with Dr. Srivastava, Dr. Schulz, Dr. Pannala, Dr. Abhyankar and Dr. Vishwanath across those collaborations.

Haider said that her time with UI-ASSIST has been a valuable one, and that she has been able to work with university partners, a national lab and a utility company during her time with the project.

“I’ve had the opportunity to lead fruitful discussions with utility companies, engage with US electricity system operators, and discuss technology transfer from research labs into field deployments. The discussions with our Indian colleagues have encouraged us to consider the socio-technical implications of our research, particularly in the design of retail markets where the electricity system differs significantly between the two regions. Such discussions and collaboration would not have been possible without UI-ASSIST,” Haider said.