Kathryn Hinkelman
University of Vermont, VT·Engineering
Homes and buildings increasingly run on electricity, through electric vehicles, heat pumps, electric water heaters and batteries. Local power grids were not built for these growing loads, and these devices are rarely coordinated.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Computer Science
- Topics
distributed energy resources
electric grid
power distribution
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Translate honeybee trophallaxis, food sharing between bees, into mathematical models and bio-inspired control methods for peer-to-peer energy sharing among electric vehicles, heat pumps, water heaters and batteries.
- Develop predictive models of uncertain building loads and energy behavior using stochastic transfer learning to support coordination of distributed energy resources.
- Evaluate the honeybee-inspired controls in Python and GridLAB-D virtual testbeds, then demonstrate them on the University of Colorado Boulder microgrid.
- Build a two-way co-simulation framework linking the Brightway life cycle assessment software and Modelica system models through the Functional Mockup Interface to assess renewable energy hubs over time.
- Compare energy- and exergy-based functional units for dynamic life cycle assessment of renewable energy hubs, and test an interactive web module for undergraduate learning.
More about the research
Judging the environmental footprint of renewable energy systems is also hard because their behavior changes over time. Both projects use computer models of energy systems: one to coordinate devices on the grid, the other to measure environmental impact as systems change.
Why it matters
Grid operators and electricity customers could benefit from coordination methods that let electric vehicles, heat pumps and batteries share power without costly new wires, which could make local grids more resilient. Dynamic life cycle assessment tools could help engineers more accurately estimate and reduce the environmental impact of renewable energy hubs. Both projects will release open-source software.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jan Kleissl
University of California-San Diego, CA·Engineering
Build DERConnect, a remote-access testbed that integrates solar panels, battery storage, electric vehicles, wind and solar emulators, and controllable building lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems.
Yuhong Liu
Santa Clara University, CA·Engineering
Gather critical use cases from stakeholders in grid-interactive communities to define research problems that call for multidisciplinary, international collaboration on clean energy.
Javad Khazaei
Lehigh University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Learn low-dimensional manifolds from time-series measurements of distributed energy resources and use them for real-time predictive control of voltage, frequency and power sharing in microgrids.
The school
University of Vermont: 16 labs on PI Pages, $246M a year on research, 76 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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