Professor Anthony Papavasiliou has been awarded the Dieter Schwarz Courageous Research Grant, which provides €1 million in funding over a period of three years. The grant supports particularly ambitious research approaches that use innovative technologies to develop new solutions to key challenges in the area of “Digitalization and Sustainability”. His project aims to better integrate energy storage systems into energy systems through digitalization and machine learning. This is particularly important because integrating renewable energy into the power grid represents a major challenge. Wind and solar energy are weather-dependent, meaning that electricity generation from these sources fluctuates significantly. As a result, supply and demand are often difficult to balance.
Energy storage systems represent an important solution to this challenge. They can store surplus energy generated and make it available again when needed. In this way, they contribute to stabilizing the electricity supply while also enabling greater use of renewable energy in the transport and heating sectors.
However, controlling renewable energy sources and energy storage systems is highly complex. It must take into account uncertain forecasts, coordinate a large number of assets, and at the same time incorporate the physical characteristics of the power grid.
Digitalization opens up new opportunities for addressing these challenges. Modern measurement and communication technologies, together with optimization methods and machine learning approaches, enable the intelligent control of the entire energy system.
The aim of this project is to develop new methods for decision-making under uncertainty while applying machine learning methods. The algorithms developed will be tested and applied on high-performance computing systems to demonstrate their performance as well as their benefits for a sustainable energy system.
Prof. Papavasiliou is conducting the project together with Prof. Christoph Goebel, Professor of Energy Management Technologies at TUM.
Interested applicants can find more information here.