Andrey Bernstein received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Between 2010 and 2011, he was a visiting researcher at Columbia University. During 2011–2012, he was a visiting assistant professor at the Stony Brook University. From 2013–2016, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Communications and Applications of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Since October 2016, he has been a senior researcher and group manager at NREL. His research interests are in the decision and control problems in complex environments and related optimization and machine learning methods, with application to power and energy systems. He leads the Energy Systems Control and Optimization group at the Power Systems Engineering Center.

Research Interests

Control and optimization of energy systems

• Real-time control of distribution networks with high penetration of renewable energy sources
• Integration of distributed and renewable generation sources
• Real-time aggregation and demand response
• Integration and control of smart buildings
• Adaptive control for power systems resilience

Data analytics for energy systems

• Real-time state estimation
• Real-time load/generation forecasting
• Distribution system topology and parameters estimation

Theory of adaptive decision making and optimization in complex environments

• Online learning and online convex optimization
• Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning
• Model and data-driven predictive control
• Game theory

Education

Ph.D., Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

M.Sc., Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

B.Sc., Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Professional Experience

Lecturer, University of Colorado Boulder (2019–Present)

Postdoctoral Researcher, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland (2012–2016)

Visiting Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University (2011–2012)

Visiting Researcher, Columbia University (2010–2011)

Researcher, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (2005–2010)

Associations and Memberships

Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Member, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences

Featured Work

Personalized Optimization With User's Feedback, Automatica (2021)

Autonomous Optimization and Control of Energy Systems, 14th World Congress of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (2021)

Good Grids Make Good Neighbors, IEEE Spectrum (2020)

Autonomous Energy Grids: Controlling the Future Grid With Large Amounts of Distributed Energy Resources, IEEE Power and Energy Magazine (2020)

Grid-Forming Frequency Shaping Control for Low-Inertia Power Systems, IEEE Control Systems Letters (2020)

Real-Time Feedback-Based Optimization of Distribution Grids: A Unified Approach, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (2019)

Online Primal-dual Methods With Measurement Feedback for Time-varying Convex Optimization, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2019)

Quasi-Stochastic Approximation and Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning, Proceedings of the 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (2019)

Patents

Real time feedback-based optimization of distributed energy resources, U.S. Patent No. 10,944,267 (2021)

Network-cognizant voltage droop control, U.S. Patent No. 10,784,682 (2020)

Real time feedback-based optimization of distributed energy resources, U.S. Patent No. 10,516,269 (2019)

Composable method for explicit power flow control in electrical grids, U.S. Patent No. 10,078,318 (2018)

Real-time control of microgrids with explicit power setpoints: unintentional islanding, U.S. Patent No. 10,078,318 (2017)

Awards and Honors

NREL President's Award, with Xinyang Zhou as part of the Autonomous Energy Systems team (2021)

NREL Key Contributor Award for Technology Commercialization, Staff Awards (2019)

NREL President's Award, for developing research area in machine learning and data-driven approaches for power systems (2018)

NREL Key Contributor Award for Technology Commercialization, Staff Awards (2018)