Cascading Failures in Power Grids

Kai Sun, Ph.D., is a professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). Dr. Sun received his bachelor’s degree in automation and his Ph.D. in control science and engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1999 and 2004, respectively. From 2007 to 2012, he was a project manager for R&D programs in grid operations, planning, and renewable integration with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California. At EPRI, Dr. Sun led the task force and project set on cascading failures, controlled system separation, and power system restoration from 2008 to 2010. Earlier, he was a research associate at Arizona State University in Tempe and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Dr. Sun received the U.S. NSF CAREER Award in 2016. His other awards include several IEEE PES Best Conference Papers Awards, a 2016 CRSTT Most Valuable Players Award by U.S. DOE/NASPI, the2009 EPRI Chauncey Award for contributions to “Advanced Tools for Reliable Operation and Robust Planning,” and the 2008 EPRI Technology Innovation Excellence Award for “establishing EPRI as a thought leader in cascading failures of power grids.” Dr. Sun has served as an associate editor with IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy, and IEEE Access. He co-authored the book Power System Control Under Cascading Failures: Understanding, Mitigation and System Restoration (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2018) and edited the book Power System Simulation Using Semi-Analytical Methods (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2023). Dr. Sun has published over 30 journal papers on modeling, prevention, and mitigation of cascading failures and holds four patents in this field.