Abstract:

The pressure to achieve carbon-free grids in the near future is driving the rapid integration of renewable energy sources into the grid. While environmental issues such as climate change tell us that this is the way to go, the technical issues involved in making significant changes to the grid show that we still have to solve new technical challenges. This was, among other things, manifested recently by several major events which occurred in the European power system.

 

Research group “Electrical Power Systems and Smart Grids” at ZHAW built several lab scale demonstrators, digital and analogue twins of electrical power systems including one of Europe to investigate today’s and future challenges in the power grid, which will be discussed in this talk.

Biography:

Petr Korba received his MSc. degree in electrical engineering from the Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic, in 1995 and his PhD degree from the University of Duisburg, Germany, in 1999. He then became a member of academic staff at the University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology where he stayed until 2001 when he joined ABB Switzerland Ltd. He held different positions in the business unit “power system automation” and he worked later for more than 10 years as a principal scientist at ABB Corporate Research Ltd. Since 2008 he has been lecturing at ETH Zurich and he became a professor of electric power systems at the Zurich university of applied sciences in 2012. He is currently the head of electric power systems and the director of the institute of energy systems and fluid engineering. Since 2016 he has been the co-director of the Swiss Competence Centre of Energy Research, Grids & Components.

Prof. Korba has published over 200 articles in international journals and at international conferences in the field of automatic control and electric power systems. He also authored and co-authored over 100 US and European patents and was nominated for the Best European Patent Award for achievements in the wide-area monitoring and control of electrical power systems in 2011.

His research activities include power system dynamics & control, development of advanced algorithms for optimal integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid, system identification, robust and adaptive control and their applications to electrical power systems. He has been serving as a senior editor and member of the editorial board of several scientific journals such as IEEE Trans. on Control systems Technology, IEEE Systems Journal, Control Engineering Practice or the Int. Journal on Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing. He received the IEEE Swiss Power & Energy Society Outstanding engineer Award in 2022.