Cornell University is the lead institution in a new national center for research on electric power systems.

Established by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSerc) comprises Cornell, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Howard University. It is funded by the NSF, electric utility companies, the Electric Power Research Institute and the participating educational institutions. The NSF will provide about $200,000 per year for five years.

"Its purpose is to help the electric-power industry achieve the high-performance capability necessary to meet the challenges created by recent legislation concerned with restructuring the nation's electric-energy systems," said Robert Thomas, Cornell professor of electrical engineering and center director. "The movement toward a restructured industry with open access transmission presents unprecedented opportunities to evolve a new way of doing business while maintaining the high level of system reliability of the past. The center is involved in a multidisciplinary effort designed especially for addressing the technical challenges brought about by the restructuring enterprise."

"This multi-university center, a nucleus for what will be a greatly expanded effort, will produce broad research results that will have significant impact on the power industry," said Alexander J. Schwarzkopf, a director of the NSF's Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers Program.

PSerc will seek to advance education and research in the expanding field of electric-power systems, to address issues arising in an increasingly competitive electric-power marketplace and to facilitate informed discussion of technical problems that stem from policy options affecting industry restructuring. Some of the center's tasks include:

• Analysis of new transmission roles, such as fast control of power flow;
• Development of new tools for design and analysis of the new regimes;
• Exploration of new roles for information, communication and measurement systems;
• Investigation of large-scale and distributed generation and delivery-system reliability;
• Exploration of containment of dynamic disruptive system phenomena.

More information on PSerc is available at: http://www.pserc.cornell.edu/pserc/.