Projects

The value of Interconnection in a Changing EU Electricity system (ICE)

Investing in new European interconnection capacity is one strategy to integrate renewables and nuclear power stations in the electricity systems of GB and Ireland, by maximising their value through exports and meeting demand peaks through imports.

This project aims to assess the value of UK interconnectors to the EU-27 and Norway, examining both the GB and the Irish Single Electricity markets.

RESTLESS

This project aims to understand how novel energy storage technologies might best be integrated into an evolving, lower-carbon UK energy system in the future. It will identify technical, environmental, public acceptability, economic and policy issues, and will propose solutions to overcome barriers to deployment.

GARPUR

GARPUR is a collaborative R&D project co-funded by the European Commission (7th Framework Programme). The GARPUR project designs, develops, assesses and evaluates new reliability criteria to be progressively implemented over the next decades at a pan-European level, while maximising social welfare. The GARPUR consortium consists of 7 TSOs (Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Iceland and Norway), 12 R&D providers and 1 innovation management expert. The overall project costs are estimated to 10.9M€, with the corresponding requested contribution from the European Commission of 7.8M€. GARPUR started September 1st 2013 and will run for 4 years until August 31st 2017.

PROAIN

PROActive INtegration of sustainable energy resources enabling active distribution networks (PROAIN) is a Sino-Danish collaboration project. The project is looking into novel ways of active distribution network management and is co-financed by Chinese Ministry of Science & Technology and Danish Council for Strategic Research.

Preventing wide-area blackouts through adaptive islanding of transmission networks

An EPSRC funded collaborative project involving universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Southampton. This interdisciplinary project, involving power engineering, graph theory and operational research, investigated methodologies to limit the occurrence and cost of blackouts through preventive splitting of large networks into islands when a cascade fault is imminent. The formed islands preserve a good demand/generation balance, without violating any transmission constraint and avoiding electromechanical instability of any generator.

Local solutions of the OPF problem

The existence of locally optimal solutions to the AC optimal power flow problem (OPF) has been a question of interest for decades. I studied this problem for my PhD work at Edinburgh university. We presented a number of examples of local solutions of the OPF problem on a variety of test networks including modified versions of common networks.

Antenna array optimisation for satellite communication applications

In this project, we studied the optimal design of antenna arrays for satellite applications. Our main focus is on the design of a large array antenna for earth coverage applications using spot beams. We proposed a binary coded genetic algorithm (BCGA) that optimises the desired element positions and their excitations to fulfill the pattern requirements. In addition thinning has been used to study the possibility of maintaining good antenna performance when reducing the number of elements.