pserc denver meeting 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