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Vishvas Chalishazar
Grid Resilience Team Leader and Electrical Engineer
Vishvas Chalishazar
Grid Resilience Team Leader and Electrical Engineer
Biography
Some disaster recovery experts look at Puerto Rico and see one thing: hurricanes. Vishvas Chalishazar sees a lot more.
Hurricanes Maria (2017) and Fiona (2022) were the primary reason Chalishazar and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) colleagues were summoned by the Department of Energy to offer their planning advice to the U.S. Caribbean island territory.
But Chalishazar, a senior PNNL research scientist with expertise in grid resilience and hydropower systems, sees electrical infrastructure fragility in many forms. There’s damage from wind speed, of course. And torrential rain. Don’t forget flying debris. Maybe flooding and mudslides. And what about earthquakes? They’re all common in Puerto Rico.
“We can't look at just one hazard,” said Chalishazar. “I build and calibrate fragility, anticipating the probability of failure for the island’s assets with respect to multiple, potentially simultaneous hazards.”
Much of Chalishazar’s work is targeted at less dramatic, though vitally essential, electrical grid planning.
He leads a team focused on modeling the transmission grid and manages a program exploring hybrid hydropower systems that combine hydropower generation with grid-scale energy storage.
He has studied and provided technical assistance for several hydropower projects, such as at the Ameren Osage Energy Center—also known as the Bagnell Dam—in Missouri. Closer to PNNL’s headquarters in Richland, Washington, Chalishazar is examining the efficiency of Energy Northwest’s Packwood Lake Hydro Project which is located five miles east of Packwood, Washington. In central Washington’s Grant County, Chalishazar is principal investigator for a PNNL partnership with the Grant County Public Utility District, exploring hybridizing the Wanapum and Priest Rapids hydropower facilities.
“There are significant economic questions that must be answered when we consider pairing these enormous hydropower plants with a battery storage system,” Chalishazar said. “We’ll provide this technical assistance for Packwood and Grant County to help inform their decision-making on hybrids. If we find that it’s a viable solution, we may see those projects in the future.”