[1] Her research specializes in electric power systems, and in modeling, scheduling, and controlling the load profile in smart grids, including the demand response of grid friendly household appliances, energy storage, and the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid.
Next, she went to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for graduate study in electric power engineering, earning a master's degree in 1999 and completing her Ph.D. in 2002.
Her dissertation, Power System Modeling Using Petri Nets, was jointly supervised by Alan Desrochers and Joe H.
[2] She became a research engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, working there from 2003 to 2012.
[2] Lu is a coauthor of books including: Lu was named an IEEE Fellow in the 2021 class of fellows, "for contributions to load modeling and control methods for providing demand side grid services".