Organizing research and educational consortia

Power engineering is not a popular area for EE students today. However, power programs are competing with other popular areas in EE for outstanding undergraduate and graduate students. Multi-university consortia pooled the resources and talents together to allow a team of researchers and educators to work on globally important areas. Therefore, the consortia can be greatly helpful in increasing the visibility of power engineering as an important, innovative and multi-disciplinary field. The Advanced Power Technologies (APT) Consortium consists of Arizona State University, Iowa State University, University of Washington and Virginia Tech. APT Center at the University of Washington is an industrial consortium where industry members pool the research funds to conduct research projects of common interest. The technical thrusts of the APT Center at the UW include research and development in advanced power technologies such as market related methodologies, FACTS applications, power system computation and control, and power quality. The research projects supported so far include power system economics, power market simulators, voltage characteristics in coherency and aggregation, FACTS and voltage dynamics, and power quality assessment.