IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2018 - 71

While it seems that our industry is surviving the workforce crisis
through this wave of grid modernization efforts, in fact, we are
just stepping into another battle.
such as power system analysis, power system operations,
power system stability and control, and power system fault
analysis and protection. some programs also offer power system planning, power system economics, and electricity
markets. a modern control systems course is often required
in these power programs. The close relationship between
power systems and control today may have been the result
of the previous workforce crisis in the 1990s. as pointed out
in the "feeding our profession" article, "Many of the same
problems occur in the subarea of automatic control. perhaps
students might be encouraged to pursue a major in power
and a minor in control (or another underenrolled subarea).
as hiring programs are not too robust, the dual expertise
could be advantageous."

Data Analytics in Power
and Energy Education
Today, for most power engineering students who want to have
analytics credits on their transcripts, they have to take additional courses outside the power engineering program. some
of these courses may reside within the electrical engineering
department, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning,
pattern recognition, database management, and some computer
programming courses. similar courses may be offered by the
computer science department. To strengthen their prescriptive
analytics background, power engineering students may take
optimization and mathematical programming-related courses
from industrial engineering and operations research. for predictive analytics, students may go outside the college of engi-

Graduate Electives

Graduate Core

neering to take statistics courses such as statistical inference,
regression analysis, time series analysis, and spatial statistics.
while the doctoral students may find this interdisciplinary training particular helpful to their research, it would
be difficult for the bachelor's and master's students to follow
the same path. Taking these courses can be quite time-consuming. adding three to five courses to the already-packed
degree program may mean delaying graduation by one or two
semesters. Moreover, the professors who teach these analytics courses outside power engineering programs may not have
much exposure to power engineering problems, so some of
the course materials may not have direct applications to power
engineering problems.
one plausible solution is to add an energy data analytics
course to existing power engineering programs. such a course
may include basic statistics and machine-learning techniques
(e.g., singular value decomposition, regression analysis, time
series analysis, and artificial neural networks) as well as representative use cases of such techniques in smart grids, electricity markets, and other segments of the power industry (e.g.,
anomaly detection, energy forecasting, and power system
model validation). within this course, students can acquire the
analytics skills and business and market knowledge related to
utility analytics. in addition, case studies in the course can be
expanded into research topics for students to delve deeper into
some subareas.
data analytics is an interdisciplinary field. Many universities currently offering analytics and data science degree
programs include interdisciplinary curricula by recognizing

Power System Relaying and Protection; Power System Stability; Advanced
Power Electronics; Power System Economics, Markets, and Regulation;
Energy Management Systems; Power Quality; Power System Transients;
Power Systems Planning and Reliability; High-Voltage ac/dc;
Flexible ac Transmission System
Power Systems Analysis; Power System Operation and Control; Power
Electronics; Power Systems Communications; Power Generation; Smart
Distribution Systems; Electric Motor Drives

Undergraduate Electives

Power Systems Analysis; Renewable Energy; Electric Motor Drives; Power Electronics; Smart Grid

Undergraduate Tech Core

Microelectronics; Linear Systems; Electromagnetic Fields; Control Systems; Energy Conversion

figure 3. Typical undergraduate and graduate power engineering courses.
may/june 2018

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2018