Dr. Line Roald

Overview

Electric power systems is at the core of modern society, powering everything from your fridge to the internet. My long-term goal is ensure that our electric grid supports is able to support increasing amounts of cleaner, greener electricity, while simultaneously preparing the grid for the challenges of more extreme weather and growing demand for electricity. In this process, we need to remember that sustainability is not only about the environment – we also need to ensure that the grid remains economically and socially sustainable to ensure electricity access for all.

Research

Our research focuses on facilitating this transition to a more sustainable and resilient energy system, while ensuring that electricity can be provided in an economically efficient and secure manner. To tackle challenges faced by participants in the energy industry, from system operators to power producers and consumers, we combine practical insights from electric power systems and power engineering with uncertainty modelling and data-driven optimization. We are developing mathematical tools and software implementations to model and optimize system operation, while taking into account the impact of uncertain events such as variations renewable energy production, component failures and large-scale outages.

Publications

Lots of interesting research going on! For an up-to-date overview of my publications, please visit my google scholar page.

Teaching

I teach the following courses at UW Madison:

• ECE 427 Electric Power Systems (Fall 2018, Fall 2020)
  An introduction to electric power systems, including components like transmission lines and transformers, AC and DC power flow and fault analysis.
• ECE/CS/ISyE 524 Introduction to optimization (Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
  An modelling-focused class that introduces to a wide range of optimization problems, including linear, convex and general non-linear optimization as well as continuous and discrete problems. Teaches students how to implement and solve such problems.

• ECE 723 Online Control of Power Systems (Spring 2024)
  A redeveloped course teaching advances methods and topics for electric power systems analysis.
• ECE 901 Electric Distribution Grids: Modeling and Analysis (Spring 2021, 2025)
  A newly developed special topics course about traditional and emerging modeling and analysis methods for electric distribution grids.
• ECE 203 Signals, Information and Computation (Fall 2022)
  Introductory class, teaching students about signals, information, and computational techniques in electrical engineering.

In addition to my teaching at UW Madison, I have developed several tutorial-style teaching materials that are meant to help PhD students get up to speed on topics relevant to their research.

• Power system optimization under uncertainty: In collaboration with David Pozo, Anthony Papavasiliou, Daniel K Molzahn, Jalal Kazempour and Antonio Conejo, I wrote an invited review paper on power system optimization under uncertainty for the Power System Computation Conference. The link to the paper is here.
• Convex relaxations in power systems optimization: In collaboration with Carleton Coffrin (Los Alamos National Laboratory), we created a small video series as a tutorial and initial guide to convex relaxations in power systems optimization. Here is a link to the description of the series, and a link to the videos themselves.