In 2018, the Secretary of Energy of the United States, Rick Perry, announced the ARPA-E Grid Optimization competition.
The first phase of the competition was aimed at solving the security constrained optimal power flow problem, which is one of the toughest and most difficult optimization problems in the energy industry.
Ignacio and his team placed first among some of the best universities and research teams in the USA in solving the problem, according to the recently announced results.
Ignacio’s team received special recognition for not only finishing first, but doing so by a significant margin, with very consistent performance across all test cases that the department of energy put together.