Background:
Intermittency caused by renewable energy sources such as PVs as well as highly stochastic power profiles of electric vehicle charging stations are gradually causing electrical grid challenges. A solution to minimise the impact of these new sources is to couple them with energy storage systems that are charged in an intelligent manner using a control framework.
COMMELEC is one such framework developed at EPFL that has been successfully tested on academic and commercial demonstration sites. Some of its key features are grid-awareness, sub-second control cycles and modularity through abstraction of energy sources.
Along with projects in which COMMELEC is currently deployed, new challenges and ideas to improve it are arising. It would be a pleasure to host a student onboard to chip in the process of enhancing this control framework.
Tasks of the student:
The following tasks are suggestion topics and may be refined or reorientated based on the student’s expertise and desires.
- Build a dashboard and real-time visualisation tool to assess the performances of the control framework.
- Write software agents that control various energy resources, such as batteries or charging stations, in an efficient programming language.
- Improve scalability of the framework by enabling hierarchical layering of electrical grids (i.e. enable the communication between multiple grid controllers)
- Enhance the flexibility of COMMELEC towards more complex grid topologies (e.g. multiple energy sources per node).
The students will get to test their implementation in a simulation environment (T-RECS) and potentially in a real scale electrical grid.
Requirements:
- Good programming experience in either Python, C++, Labview, Rust or Go.
- Knowledge on electrical grids is not required but appreciated.
Contact:
Plouton Grammatikos – [email protected]
Enea Figini – [email protected]
Max Chevron – [email protected]