Following several major power system outages (“blackouts”) in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s various industry groups (e.g. WECC) and regulatory agencies (e.g. NERC as empowered by FERC) coordinated efforts to better plan for and protect against such events in the future. One significant outcome of these efforts was Standardization of test and model validation efforts for generating units and their controls.

In this discussion, Mr. Leonard will focus on:

1. Model validation test philosophy, protocol, schedule and operational impacts
2. Modeling accuracy issues
3. Lessons learned over the course of this model validation effort, including those related to Inverter-Based Resource (IBR) modeling.

Mr. Leonard founded Peregrine Engineering Consulting in 2018. Prior to Peregrine, since 1991 he worked at GE Schenectady, where his work focused on test, analysis and control of dynamic behavior in electric utility and industrial power systems.

For the past twenty-five+ years he has specialized in power plant dynamic performance testing, focusing on evaluation of turbine-generator controls performance and interaction with the power system. Mr. Leonard is a registered Professional Engineer in the state of New York, most other US States and Provinces in CANADA. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and has co-authored several conference papers on power electronic applications, voltage stability and artificial intelligence applications in power systems, and was an associate editor and contributing author for a handbook on HVDC applications published by EPRI.

Mr. Leonard has served as an Adjunct Faculty member at Clarkson University where he taught a graduate-level course on Power Systems Analysis.