Professor Fran Li received two major awards at the recent IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, which took place July 19-23 in Montreal, Canada.

Li, the John W. Fisher Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of CURENT, was selected as the recipient of the 2026 IEEE PES Roy Billinton Power System Reliability Award and received the IEEE PES Prize Paper Award.

Named in honor of Roy Billinton, who is widely regarded as the founder of modern power system reliability, the prestigious Billinton award recognizes individuals for their contributions to the reliability of electric power systems.

Li was selected for his contributions to probabilistic methods in market simulation, grid reliability, and resilience assessment. Li is the first person affiliated with the University of Tennessee to be selected for the Billinton honor.

“It is a tremendous honor to receive the IEEE PES Roy Billinton Power System Reliability Award. It is especially meaningful because it bears the name of Professor Roy Billinton, the pioneer of modern power system reliability,” Li said. “Like many of us, I learned power system reliability by studying his books and papers. His work has inspired generations of engineers and researchers, including myself.”

Li and his co-authors received the Prize Paper Award for the paper, “Virtual Inertia Scheduling (VIS) for Real-Time Economic Dispatch of IBR-Penetrated Power Systems.” Li’s co-authors include former EECS PhD students Buxin She (’23), Hantao Cui (’18), Jinning Wang (’25), Qiwei Zhang (’22), and Rui Bo (’09).

The paper resulted from a collaborative Department of Defense Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (DoD ESTCP) project among researchers from the UT/CURENT, North Carolina State University, and Missouri University of Science and Technology. The work helped lay the foundation for the creation of a new IEEE Task Force titled “Virtual Inertia Scheduling and Control (VISC) for IBR-Penetrated Power Systems.”

Early in his career, Li pioneered probabilistic approaches for locational marginal pricing (LMP) and electricity market simulations. Over the past two decades, his research has significantly advanced methodologies for assessing grid reliability and resilience, including several award-winning publications in grid reliability and resilience, a book on power distribution system resilience, and a recent paper published in Nature Energy examining the impact on power grid vulnerability posed by weather-dependent renewable energy resources that has attracted broad interest within and beyond the power and energy community.

Li was presented with his awards at the IEEE PES Awards Banquet on July 21.

“My students and postdoc researchers are the reason I am in the position to receive these awards. Their talent and dedication can’t be overstated,” Li said. “I am so proud of their work and how much they have grown. The prize paper award is just one example of their excellence.”

Contact

Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)