Published

Sometime in the past few weeks I officially began my career as recognized academic: my paper got published.  The paper in question was one I submitted for the conference in Detroit at the end of July and for reasons that I don't understand it took them roughly three months to get it posted online.

But here it is.

As circumstances would have it, just yesterday I started writing the paper I'll be submitting for the 2012 session of the same conference.  The deadline is the end of the month and I've got all the research done; all that's left is the process of assembling the words in a clear and helpful manner.  This paper will be on a completely different topic: rather than dealing with wind turbines I'm looking at the effect on the electrical distribution system of the addition of a significant amount of generation.  Said differently, when a bunch of people, businesses, and manufacturers install solar panels and wind turbines, how does that affect the operation of the neighborhood electrical system?  Traditionally power flows from the big generators to the customers but in this case, if enough people install solar panels, that flow may end up reversed.

(For the power nerds out there, here are the details. Due to the effective limitation in IEEE 1547-2003, inverters can only contribute real power to the distribution feeder.  At high penetration levels this could lead to a case where real power is flowing towards the substation but reactive power is still having to be supplied by the substation and/or capacitors on the feeder.  My paper seeks to discover if this counter-flow between real and reactive power is a significant issue or not.)

My greatest fear is going through the process of submitting it through the IEEE website.  Last year it was a torturous process due to an unspecified problem with how their software interpreted the files I sent over. Now that I'm aware of the problem I'm going to try to get it all squared away before I submit it but there is a lot out of my control and I expect there will be problems once again.