The European Energy Research Alliance Joint Programme on Smart Grids (EERA JP SG) brings together leading research organizations to align national and European R&D efforts in the field of smart grids. The EERA JP SG launches a PhD Candidate Award to honour outstanding PhD research pathways that advance the field of smart grids. The award focuses on the quality, originality, and relevance of the research plan, methodology, and progress achieved to date by PhD candidates who have been enrolled in their doctoral studies for at least one year.
Gold medal winner Kaan Yurtseven:
My PhD research focuses on developing decision-support tools that help power system operators manage grid congestion and uncertainty as Europe’s electricity grids integrate increasing shares of renewable energy during the energy transition.
Within my PhD, I developed advanced optimisation frameworks that transform uncertainty into actionable information, enabling grid operators to make risk-aware operational decisions.
This helps ensure security of supply while reducing congestion management and balancing costs. These costs currently amount to billions of euros each year in Europe and are expected to increase further as renewable integration grows.By enabling electricity grids to integrate large shares of renewable energy while ensuring secure and cost-efficient operation, this work contributes to addressing key operational challenges of the energy transition in Europe.
Silver medal winner Giacomo Bastianel:
My PhD focuses on increasing the flexibility of the power system to maximize the integration of renewable energy in our society.
The power system was largely built decades ago to connect fossil-fuel power plants to major demand centres. Today, as we transition toward a net-zero energy system with a high share of renewable energy sources, we still rely heavily on that same infrastructure, which was not built and optimised for renewables. As a result, we see a long interconnection queue for renewable projects waiting to be connected to the grid, and billions of euros are spent yearly in congestion management costs because we do not have enough transmission capacity to transmit carbon-free electricity to our homes.
While building new transmission lines is necessary, such investments often take more than ten years to materialise, while we are experiencing problems now. For this reason, we can use the existing grid more efficiently to solve congestion by actively modifying its topology, which is the core focus of my PhD research.
Through mathematical optimisation models, I can adapt the grid topology to maximise the renewables integration in society and solve congestion while keeping the investment and operational costs to a minimum. In addition, considering the bold European plans for offshore wind in the North Sea, I have identified relevant constraints for system operators when they consider large-scale investments in offshore renewables.
