MY RESEARCH
By: Francisco Molina.

My name is Francisco Molina and I am pursuing the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering at National Sun Yat-Sen University in the port city of Kaohsiung. I come from El Salvador. I have worked there for five years in a utility company in charge to manage and operate Salvadorian’s Electrical Power System.

About my stay at Taiwan, once one arrives to the university, it is asked to join any of the laboratories in the Power Electric area to develop the thesis topic. Basically due to my background, I joined the “Energy Management System” Lab. In here I am learning the tools to solve practical power system operation problems. So far I am studying techniques such as GIS (which is an information system capable of analyzing, sharing and displaying geographically referenced information), SCADA (systems typically used to perform data collection and control at the supervisory level), Automatic Control, Power System Security, among others. All these general themes will later be applied to more specific processes such as Economic Dispatch, Power Planning, Unit Commitment, etc. At this point, I am performing bibliography research and reading all previous research made in my lab as well as around the world. These can be found in technical papers, books, international conferences summarizes, to mention some of them. We have regular meetings with all members of my lab, who are masters or PhD’s students. In those meetings we discuss about any specific topic and evaluate our weakness, progress and of course, serve to learn from other’s experiences. In essence, it is a meeting where we exchange knowledge and experience. And of course, we can practice our dissertation skills.

At the moment, it is still soon for me to have decided my research topic. However I have some ideas about it. I am interested in applying any of the techniques mentioned to the Economic Dispatch problem. This is defined as the process of allocating generation levels to the generating units in the mix, so that the system lead may be supplied entirely and most economically. In my opinion this topic is important for my country because of its electrical system characteristics. First of all, it is a deregulated market. Secondly, all Central America is interconnected. Therefore, to develop method or methods to dispatch the generation in the most economic possible way is very important in order to maintain competitiveness. These methods can be general concepts, computational programs, new algorithms, etc. that can further be applied to El Salvador electrical market, and probably around the Central American area.