At the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Awards Banquet on July 21, 2026, held during the 2026 IEEE PES General Meeting in Montreal, Dr. Fran Li and his co-authors received the 2026 IEEE PES Prize Paper Award. The co-authors include several of Dr. Li’s former PhD students: Buxin She (now an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University), Hantao Cui (now an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University), Jinning Wang (now a Senior Engineer at GE Vernova), Qiwei Zhang (now an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio), and Rui Bo (now an Impact Professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology).
The award-winning paper is:
“Virtual Inertia Scheduling (VIS) for Real-Time Economic Dispatch of IBR-Penetrated Power Systems”
Authors: B. She, F. Li, H. Cui, J. Wang, Q. Zhang, and R. Bo
Publication: IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 938–951, April 2024.
The paper resulted from a collaborative DOD ESTCP project among researchers from UTK/CURENT, North Carolina State University, and Missouri University of Science and Technology. It proposed a novel approach for scheduling virtual inertia from inverter-based resources (IBRs) while incorporating dynamic frequency-security constraints into real-time economic dispatch. Full-order time-domain simulations were employed to validate the scheduling results. As a seminal contribution in this emerging research area, the work also helped to lay the foundation for the creation of a new IEEE Task Force titled “Virtual Inertia Scheduling and Control (VISC) for IBR-Penetrated Power Systems.”
The IEEE PES Prize Paper Award is selected through a highly competitive two-stage process. First, individual PES Technical Committees and PES Transactions select their respective best papers from eligible papers published during the preceding three years. These winning papers then advance to the PES-level competition, where the PES Prize Paper Award Committee members selected, through a competitive vote, two PES Prize Papers from among the Technical Committee- and Transactions-level awardee.
At the same Awards Banquet, Dr. Li also received the IEEE PES Roy Billinton Power System Reliability Award, which was previously reported, making the evening especially memorable for Dr. Li and his research team.
Congratulations to Dr. Li and his co-authors on this prestigious recognition!
Dr. Li and his co-authors accepted the PES Prize Paper Award.
Dr. Li accepted the IEEE PES Roy Billinton Power System Reliability Award.