Abstract

The Clean Energy Transition (CET) has become a priority for Europe to move from a fossil fuel-based to a carbon-free energy model by 2050. Power processing systems, including power electronics, energy storage and power-to-X transformation technologies have become key enabling systems to realize such a CET. In this lecture, we will take a bird's eye view of the evolution of power systems, commenting on some of their most relevant technologies, and we will review the main ideas that led to the grid-forming power converter solution proposed by Prof. Rodriguez more than a decade ago, discussing potential improvements and future research.

Short biography

Pedro Rodriguez (Fellow, IEEE) received the MSc and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 1994 and 2004, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher with CPES, Virginia Tech, USA, the Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark, and MIT Energy Initiative, Boston, USA. He was a Co-Supervisor of the Vestas Power Program, Denmark, from 2007 to 2011. He was a Director of technology on modern power systems with Abengoa Research, from 2011 to 2017. He was a Full Professor with Loyola University Andalusia, Sevilla, Spain between 2017-2020. Since 2021, he is the head of the Intelligent Clean Energy Systems (ICES) unit at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). He is also linked with UPC as a part-time Professor. He was on Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers in Engineering from 2015 to 2018. He has co-authored one Wiley–IEEE book, more than 100 papers in ISI technical journals, and around 300 papers in conference proceedings. He is the holder of 16 licensed patents. He has participated in more than 50 projects with industrial partners and several EU projects. His research interests include intelligent energy systems, distributed generation, and universal energy access. He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics on Power Electronics, and IEEE Journal on Industrial Electronics and Energies.