Bala Kameshwar Poolla received a bachelor's degree with honors in electrical engineering, a master's degree in control system engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in India, and a Ph.D. degree from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich in Switzerland. He is currently a research engineer at NREL. He was previously a postdoctoral scholar with the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include applications of control theory to power grids, renewable energy systems, and energy markets.

Research Interests

Distributed control of networked systems

Stability of low-inertia power systems

Power markets

Education

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, ETH Zürich

M.Tech., Electrical Engineering (Control System Engineering), IIT Kharagpur

B.Tech.(H), Electrical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur

Professional Experience

Research Engineer, NREL (2022–Present)

Postdoctoral Researcher, NREL (2020–2022)

Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, Berkeley (2019–2020)

Ph.D. Candidate, ETH Zürich (2014–2019)

Featured Work

Pricing and Energy Trading in Peer-to-peer Zero Marginal-cost Microgrids, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Smart Grid (2022)
 
State Estimation for Distribution Networks with Asynchronous Sensors using Stochastic Descent, IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (2022)

Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Look-Ahead Economic Dispatch, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (2021)

Input-Output Performance of Linear-Quadratic Saddle-Point Algorithms with Application to Distributed Resource Allocation Problems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2020)

A Market Mechanism for Virtual Inertia, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid (2020)

Grid-Coupled Dynamic Response of Battery-Driven Voltage Source Converters, IEEE SmartGridComm (2020)

Quadratic Performance Analysis of Secondary Frequency Controllers, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (2019)

Placement and Implementation of Grid-Forming and Grid-Following Virtual Inertia and Fast Frequency Response, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (2019)

Optimal Placement of Virtual Inertia in Power Grids, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2017)

Increasing the Resilience of Low-inertia Power Systems by Virtual Inertia and Damping, International Institute of Research and Education in Power System Dynamics (2017)