|
|
Enron Mail |
Vince,
The PSerc meeting Lance and I went to was both interesting and boring. PSerc has 11 school members and 30 industry members. Its Research Program consists of three stems: Markets, Transmission and Distribution, and Systems. (Enron's interests probably lie mainly in the first stem.) In morning of the first day, researchers from universities presented their project proposals. I found some of them quite interesting. For example, Shmuel Oren, Fernando Alvarado, Tim Mount (of Cornell) propose to study "Market Redesign: Incorporating the lessons learned from actual experiences for enhancing market design," Shijie Deng, S. Oren et al propose to study " Power asset valuation model in a market-based and reliability-constrained electric power system." The first got funded but the second did not. In the same afternoon industry and academic separated to have their own discussion. I went to the academic discussion and Lance the industry one. I hope my presence there did not make things worse, for the discussion revealed a lot of organizational chaos and confusion. The proposal screen process got a lot of heat from participants. The proposal process goes as follows: researchers first write a short proposal to appropriate stem committee (no industry participantion, it seems to me), each committee then ranks the proposal and selects the top 3 or 4. The selected proposals are then expanded to be present to the industry. Industry then gets to vote which proposals get funded. However, some researchers were very unhappy about the initial ranking and selection process. There were accusation of self-ranking, communication between stem committee and member schools breaking down, and so on. Some were even asking for some sort of assurance that the project will be funded even before wrting it (the arguement was "Then it was a waste of our time to write proposals", which I found quite amusing). All in all, I found the process was not taken seriously enough by university researchers. PSerc has been established for 5 years now and it still does not have a proper proposal screen process, which is hard to believe. Also, the communication among university researchers, between stem committee and member schools, and most importantly, between researchers and industry, are not smooth as all. Since the proposals are voted by 30 or so industry members, the "right" projects may not get funded. Too many participants also make the decision process very indecisive and quite painful to watch (Lance can comment on this better). They also wanted to spread the fund among all schools which made the voting a less authoritive. I believe Enron will not get much returns from join PSerc (price tag is $40,000 per company per year). If we find some projects interesting, we can sponsor the schools in the form of summer interns, the schools claim that most of the fund goes to support students anyway. Alex
|