Dr. Khaled Abdul-Rahman, PhD
Dr. Khaled Abdul-Rahman offers a wide consulting experience in a variety of applications related to Power Systems operations, planning and electricity markets. His deep knowledge of the electrical power industry restructuring coupled with his advanced technical and analytical skills, information technology experience and his management and personal skills make him an excellent fit for key roles in both market design and implementation of projects related to various aspects of the electric power system industry. He is nationally recognized as expert in Scheduling and Unit Commitment applications. His specific experience also includes functional specifications development, gap analysis and needs assessment studies, proposal preparation, RFP development, vendor evaluation and selection, and designing, implementing and testing energy market systems.

Dr. Abdul-Rahman has recently been heavily involved with Austin Energy in Austin, Texas, in its effort to prepare for the new Nodal Market in Texas. This includes the development of a needs assessment study, gap analysis and gap assessment, product list development, RFI development and vendor selection. Phase II work with Austin Energy includes development of functional specifications and implementation of all the energy market systems and processes required to support AE’s participation in the new Nodal Market in Texas.

Khaled has also been heavily involved with the California ISO (CAISO) in its effort to design and implement the new Market Redesign and Technology Update (MRTU) Locational-Marginal Pricing (LMP) based market in California. The MRTU project involves massive market applications changes in the areas of Full Network Modeling, Day-Ahead, Reliability Unit Commitment, Scheduling, Hour-Ahead, Real-Time markets, Congestion Revenue Rights (CRR), Settlements and Billing. The market re-design involves switching from zonal pricing to a full network model and nodal pricing or LMP. This effort involves:

• Heavily involved in the design and implementation of the MRTU of the Forward Market (Day-ahead and Hour-Ahead) and the Real-Time market.
• Heavily involved in the design and implementation of the MRTU Real Time Market (RTM).
• Heavily involved in the design and implementation of the MRTU Reliability Unit Commitment process (RUC).
• Heavily involved in the design and implementation of the MRTU modified Hour Ahead Market (HASP).
• Member of the FTR/CRR implementation Team.
• Heavily involved in cross-MRTU system design issues and in resolving integration issues throughout the MRTU enterprise.
• Assisted in the design of the requirements of the MRTU Market Monitoring System.
• Heavily involved in resolving issues related to the full AC network model inside CAISO control area.
• Assist in identifying criteria, and resolving issues with CAISO State Estimator.
• Heavily involved in writing the functional requirements for the forward markets RFP.
• Assist in the evaluation and selection process of the Forward markets software vendor.
• Member of the forward markets Content Team to assess the technical capabilities/shortcomings of the different candidate vendors.
• Assist in the Unit Commitment data collection and results analysis of the CAISO Forward Market “Proof-of-Concept” project using Siemens’s Security Constrained Unit commitment (SCUC) software package.
• Member of the CAISO Real-Time market application validation and Testing Team to perform Factory Acceptance Test for the ABB’s Real-Time software package. This effort involved testing SCED optimization engine, testing SCUC optimization engine, testing out-of-market sequence (OOS).
• Member of a CAISO team for utilizing ABB’s transmission constrained unit commitment software to assist Grid Operators issue the waiver denial instructions for must-offer resources.
• Heavily involved in developing the database and the input cases for the testing of all the MRTU systems.
• Heavily involved in developing the testing scenarios, test cases, entrance and exit criteria for all Forward and Real Time market applications.
• Team Lead for Testing the Siemens Forward and Real-Time Markets including the following functions: Market Power Mitigation (MPM), Integrated Day-ahead forward Market, Reliability Unit Commitment (RUC), Integrated Hour-Ahead process, Real-time Pre-Dispatch, Interval Dispatch, Contingency Dispatch, Manual Dispatch, and Very-Short-Term-Load-Prediction (VSTLP). The Siemens’ software is based on the ILOG-CPLEX optimization library to solve mixed integer programs of the different markets. This included Unit testing with the vendor, pre-FAT, FAT, and SAT.
• Responsible for managing the communications related to all testing activities of the MRTU Forward and real Time markets with the testing teams, the ISO project and program managers and vendors.