Nader Samaan

About Nader Samaan

Nader Samaan is a chief power systems research engineer and a team lead for the Grid Analytics team within the Electricity Infrastructure Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He has been performing research in the areas of renewables integration, transmission planning, production cost modeling, and cascading outage analysis at PNNL since 2009. He is PI/PM for SuNLaMP project developing planning and operational tools to enable high penetration of distributed PV through the optimization of sub-transmission voltage regulation. He is the PI for the Dynamic Contingency Analysis Tool (DCAT) that introduces a hybrid steady-state and dynamic analysis approach for cascading outage analysis. DCAT has been selected for the prestigious 2018 R&D 100 Awards. He was PNNL technical lead for several studies that investigate the impact of high distributed PV penetration on the Duke Energy Carolinas and Florida systems. He was the PI/PM for NWPP EIM benefits analysis study. He has been the PI/PM for the WECC VGS balancing authorities cooperation study. He was involved in several other projects such as, developing an approach for predicting regulation reserve requirements for CAISO in the day-ahead time frame.Prior to joining PNNL he has worked in EnerNex corp, Knoxville, TN as a power systems engineer for four years. He performed wind integration studies, harmonics and transient analysis for wind power plants, and wind turbine dynamics molding. Prior to that, he was a visiting assistant professor at the department of electrical and computer engineering, Kansas State University during the academic year 2004-05. Dr. Samaan is a registered professional engineer in the state of Ohio, a senior member of Power Engineering Society. He is a member of WECC Data Subcommittee. He has published more than ninety technical papers and reports. He obtained his PhD degree from Texas A&M University in 2004, in the area of power system reliability analysis.

Experience

1. Chief Power Systems Research Engineer

   Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

   Jan 2020 — Present · Richland/Kennewick/Pasco, WA, US

Education

• Alexandria University

  B.S., Electrical Engineering-Power Systems

  1991 — 1996

• Alexandria University

  M.S., Electrical Engineering-Power Systems

  1996 — 1999

• Texas A&M University

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Electrical Engineering-Power Systems

  2000 — 2004

Skills

• Power Systems
• Energy
• Electrical Engineering
• Electric Power
• Cascading Outage Analysis
• Power Plants
• Transmission Planning
• Matlab
• Engineering
• Renewable Energy
• Smart Grid
• Power Generation
• Production Cost Modeling
• Simulations
• Renewables Integration
• Transmission
• Wind Energy
• Wind