Assistant Professor: Self-Organizing Power Grids

Assistant Professor Position in Self-Organizing Power Grids

Job Description

Decarbonizing our society leads to massive changes in the energy sector. The future electricity system must be flexible, inclusive, digital, distributed, agile, and renewable, while the levels of reliability, safety, and affordability must be maintained if not improved, since also transport, heating, and industry will soon depend on this societal backbone. The power system and its scientific foundation are at a turning point: decarbonization and independence of foreign fossil fuel are new requirements that drive the development towards a more distributed architecture, stochastic renewable generation units, smart loads, inclusive markets and technology, complex ownership, and power assets connected via power electronics. New and unsolved phenomena such as swarm behaviour of smart power prosumers (consumers and producers) render existing, centralized, white-box methods for planning and operations inefficient: A scientific leap towards power grid self-organization is needed.

This Assistant Professor position is focused on self-organization and adaptability in energy systems. This involves research to develop the analytical and numerical foundations for autonomous power grid operation, prove the convergence and stability of swarm behaviour, and validate novel control strategies that quickly adapt to rapid changes in supply/demand. New effective market, contracting, and algorithmic mechanisms are needed to be derived for local/global supply/demand matching, balancing, and congestion management, also taking hierarchies of local/global markets into account, or societal issues like fairness.

Emergent behaviour of large fleets of autonomous power assets is complex. Independent members must work with and maybe share pareto fronts, probability distributions, risks, and other functions that describe the complex dependencies and uncertainties of such a system. This position aims at designing an intrinsically stable and freely scalable, potentially distributed power system based on 100% power electronic connected generation. The required internal principles of such a system, e.g., self-organizing controller interaction, are still unknown. You will investigate when does self-organization emerge, what levels and types of complexity are intrinsically safe, and how a particular architecture scales in a stable way.

The self-organizing power grids research involves the following aspects:

• Design and analysis of self-organizing energy systems, investigating transactional vs. cooperative approaches
• Analytical design of mechanisms, frameworks, and rules
• System design and behaviour: mechanism design (includes market mechanisms, game rules) with provable behaviour
• Behaviour analysis: evolutionary / cooperative / non-cooperative game theory considering equilibria, strategies, stability, convergence, and dynamics
• Empirical/experimental design and emergent behaviour: (multiple) market places, collectives and networks
• Simulations: computer experiments, digital twins, hardware in the loop experiments, computational economics/social sciences, network flows, agent-based approaches, integrated systems, holistic design
• Application of advanced mathematics such as complexity theory, mean field game theory, or statistical methods on large-scale cyber-physical power systems
• Combination of decentralized (self-organizing) and centralized (governed) organization: what can be self-organising? What should be centralized and/or controlled? How do these interact and co-exist?
• Publicly governed subsystems vs. private subsystems and actors
• Autonomous actors (and actions) vs. (sub)system responsible parties (operations, control, accounting, market operators)
• Distributed cyber-physical controls, consensus protocols, gracefully degrading system stability and performance

This position is established within the Intelligent Electrical Power Grids (IEPG) group of the Electrical Sustainable Energy department.

Job Requirements

• You thrive on conducting ground breaking research geared to resolving challenges faced by society and industry.
• Using your communication and networking skills, you build relevant networks with industrial partners and colleagues of various TU Delft faculties, and convince stakeholders of the value of your research proposals.
• You also enjoy mentoring and interacting with students.
• A PhD degree and postdoctoral experience in electrical power grids, applied mathematics, distributed systems or a comparable field.
• Strong mathematical modelling skills, experience in software development and the willingness to perform experimental work.
• A team player personality, organizational and managerial skills to interact and cooperate effectively with staff and other research institutes and organizations, including industry.
• A good command of spoken and written English, as you’ll be working in an internationally diverse community, and a good command of the Dutch language or the willingness to learn this.
• Good teaching and presentation skills (didactic qualities), and to develop and pursue an ambitious research programme.

We encourage applications from highly motivated scientists working in power systems, applied mathematics or distributed systems.

About the Department

The research in the Electrical Sustainable Energy (ESE) Department is inspired by the technical, scientific, and societal challenges originating from the transition towards a more sustainable society and focuses on four areas:

• DC Systems, Energy Conversion and Storage (DCE&S)
• Photovoltaic Materials and Devices (PVMD)
• Intelligent Electrical Power Grids (IEPG)
• High Voltage Technologies (HVT)

The ESE Department owns the ESP laboratory and a large RTDS cluster that is actively used for real-time simulation of future electrical power systems, AC and DC protection, and wide-area monitoring, protection and control. The IEPG group, headed by Professor Peter Palensky, works on the future of our power system. The goal is to generate, transmit and use electrical energy in a highly reliable, efficient, stable, clean, affordable, and safe way.

The selected candidate will receive a generous start-up package to pursue their ideas, including 1 PhD candidate and the possibility to collaborate with excellent researchers on related topics.

TU Delft (Delft University of Technology)

Delft University of Technology is built on strong foundations. As creators of the world-famous Dutch waterworks and pioneers in biotech, TU Delft is a top international university combining science, engineering and design. It delivers world class results in education, research and innovation to address challenges in the areas of energy, climate, mobility, health and digital society. For generations, our engineers have proven to be entrepreneurial problem-solvers, both in business and in a social context.

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) brings together three scientific disciplines. Combined, they reinforce each other and are the driving force behind the technology we all use in our daily lives. Technology such as the electricity grid, which our faculty is helping to make completely sustainable and future-proof. At the same time, we are developing the chips and sensors of the future, whilst also setting the foundations for the software technologies to run on this new generation of equipment – which of course includes AI. Meanwhile we are pushing the limits of applied mathematics, for example mapping out disease processes using single cell data, and using mathematics to simulate gigantic ash plumes after a volcanic eruption. In other words: there is plenty of room at the faculty for ground-breaking research. We educate innovative engineers and have excellent labs and facilities that underline our strong international position. In total, more than 1000 employees and 4,000 students work and study in this innovative environment.

Conditions of Employment

• Duration of contract is 12-18 months with the prospect of permanent
• Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities
• The TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, discounts on health insurance, and a monthly work costs contribution
• Flexible work schedules can be arranged

Additional Information

For more information about this vacancy please contact Prof. Peter Palensky, head of the IEPG group, email: p.palensky@tudelft.nl, phone +31 (0)15 2788341.