Mayank Panwar is a senior research engineer in the Integrated Devices and Systems group of Power Systems Engineering Center at NREL. His research spans modeling, co-simulation, evaluation and field deployment of power and energy technologies for cleaner and resilient electric grids. He leads the hydropower emulation project at NREL’s Flatirons Campus, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Water Power Technologies Office and aims to build a scalable emulation capability for hydropower grid integration using a mix of real-time simulations, hardware in the loop and machine learning techniques. He is also the technical lead for several other projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy: the Power Converter for Electrolyzer Applications project (funded by the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office); the Resilient Alaskan Distribution System Improvements using Automation, Network Analysis, Control, and Energy Storage project in Cordova, Alaska; and multiple Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems hybrid energy projects, for which he is a technical contributor, including federated real-time simulations “SuperLab 2.0” project using Office of Science’s Energy Sciences Network On-demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System.

Research Interests

Electric microgrids

Hydrogen energy storage

Hydropower grid integration

Hardware-in-the-loop simulations

Machine learning applications for power grids

Education

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Colorado State University, United States of America

M.S., Electrical Engineering, Colorado State University, United States of America

B.S., Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, India

Professional Experience

Senior Research Engineer, NREL (2022–Present)

Research Engineer, NREL (2020–2022)

Research Scientist, Idaho National Laboratory (2017–2020)

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Idaho National Laboratory (2017)

Engineer (Operations and Maintenance), NTPC Limited, India (2007–2011)

Associations and Memberships

Member, IEEE Power & Energy Society

Featured Work

NREL and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Demonstrate Multi-Lab Capabilities in Live Demonstration, NREL News Article (2022) 

Forecasting Solar-Thermal Systems Performance Under Transient Operation Using a Data-Driven Machine Learning Approach Based on the Deep Operator network architecture, Energy Conversion and Management (2022)

Grid-Scale Ternary-Pumped Thermal Electricity Storage for Flexible Operation of Nuclear Power Generation under High Penetration of Renewable Energy Sources, MDPI Energies (2021)

A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis-Based Approach for Dispatch of Electric Microgrids, International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems (2017)

Integration of Flow Battery for Resilience Enhancement of Advanced Distribution Grids, International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems (2019)

Distributed Real-Time Simulations for Electric Power Engineering [Book Chapter], IET Cyber-physical social systems and constructs in electric power engineering (2016)

Design of Resilient Electric Distribution Systems for Remote Communities: Surgical Load Management Using Smart Meters, Resilience Week (2021)

Power Converter Topologies for Electrolyzer Applications to Enable Electric Grid Services, Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society(2021)

Data-Driven Approach for Hydropower Plant Controller Prototyping Using Remote Hardware in the Loop, U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office Peer Review, (2022)

PHIL Testing of Integrated Supercapacitor Energy Storage System for Providing Blackstart and Wide-Area Stability Services through DER Plants, RTDS Applications and Technology Conference (2019)