Holmdel High Junior Presents At Prestigious Conference

HOLMDEL, NJ — Holmdel High School junior Jonathan Marty has been invited to present his research paper on whether smart cars drain the power grid at the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) national conference for engineering.

The IEEE ISGT (Innovative Smart Grid Technology) 2018 conference will be held from February 19-22 in Washington, D.C.

Marty’s paper, titled “Economic Incentives for Reducing Peak Power Loads in Electric Vehicle Charging Stations” started out as a poster project for his Honors Advanced Research (HAR) class at Holmdel High School.

His inspiration for the project stemmed “from the observation that the use of electric cars is growing, and while that is great in dropping the use of fossil fuels, there is now a potential problem of the cars draining power off the power grid”, explained his teacher, Dr. Josephine Blaha.

As Jonathan explains it, “I developed a method to help ease the adoption of electric vehicles on the already over-stressed U.S. power grid. The method consists of individual charging stations using batteries to redistribute load on the power grid by charging when demand is low and discharging when demand is high. This improvement to charging stations resulted in major reductions in the effect of electric cars on peak power grid demand, and therefore decreased the need to invest in more power grid infrastructure, thus possibly allowing for accelerated adoption of electric vehicles. Over the course of my research project I ran large-scale power grid simulations, did statistical analysis, and created essays and presentations explaining my research.”

Jonathan's project actually did not compete that well when shared in local science competitions. However, he didn't give up. He shared his work with the director of power grid research at Vencore Labs, who offered the Holmdel student a summer internship.

"Over the summer of working in a research lab I become more confident and, with the help of my mentor, made extensions and clarifications to the project," Jonathan said. “I decided to submit the paper to the IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies conference. Though this particular conference is very selective, I believed in the quality of the research and submitted a paper. I was very pleased to have the paper accepted for publication in the conference proceedings and quite surprised that in addition to the paper being accepted, I was asked to present the paper in during the conference (a small portion of the accepted papers are presented).”

Dr. Blaha said his work is incredibly relevant, with the advent of an increasing number of electric cars on the road, and the constant demand for recharging.

“To have an 11th grader present a paper, not just a poster, which in itself is impressive, to an IEEE professional conference is an amazing accomplishment. We are so proud of Jon’s tenacity with this work.”

Jonathan plans to study Computer Science (CS) or Computer Engineering (CE) in college.