Postdoctoral Researcher, ETH Zurich
power system control, power system dynamics, power system optimization, renewable energy
Georgia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Power Systems Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland advised by Prof. Gabriela Hug. Her research interests lie in the areas of power system stability, optimization, and control with a focus on power systems incorporating renewable energy. In 2021, she received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering with the Electric Energy Systems Laboratory, McGill University, Canada under the supervision of Prof. Xiaozhe Wang. In 2017, she received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. Georgia is a recipient of the D. W. Ambridge Convocation Prize (2022), the Green Talents Award (2021), the McGill Stavros Niarchos Foundation Fellowship (2017-2019), the McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (2017-2021), the Hellenic Scholarships Foundation Award (2019), the McGill Graduate Research Enhancement and Travel Award (2019), and the George Kontaxis Award (2018).
Integrating Electric Vehicle Charging and Renewable Generation in Smart Electric Railway Stations: A Stochastic Approach
Renewable generation, including distributed wind and photovoltaic generators, is constantly growing, and is expected to have an increased importance in the operation of modern power systems. However, the volatile nature of renewable energy introduces uncertainties of high level to power grids, posing new challenges to their operation from different aspects. Hence, to ensure the secure power system operation and power quality and avoid stressed system conditions, uncertainty management requires more effort.
At the same time, the electric energy consumption of the transportation sector, private and public, is expected to increase in the coming decades as the trend of electrification of road vehicles continues. Particularly, in recent years there has been a major push to also electrify road vehicles, including buses, cars as well as trucks, as this is seen as a means to decarbonize the overall energy system. Such electrification puts an additional major strain onto the electric energy supply system. Therefore, critical questions that arise include the charging schedule as well as the charging locations for these electrified vehicles.
Given the central location of electric railway stations with many buses passing through and parking lots where people use the park and rail option, we investigate the vision of train stations becoming future energy hubs. At such energy hubs, vehicles are being charged while waiting for the next scheduled departure in the case of buses or while being parked at the parking lot waiting for the owner to return in the case of private cars. The vision of these hubs also includes feeding from renewable generation located at the train stations to leverage the opportunity for charging using renewable energy.
To this end, novel optimization algorithms are designed enabling the coordination of charging of electric vehicles (buses and cars) with the available local renewable generation and the train power supply. Concepts, such as receding horizon control, are employed to find the optimal charging schedule, balance any renewable uncertainty, and optimize energy management. It is anticipated that the proposed algorithms may provide significant insights regarding the impacts of multiple energy hubs and expected future demand onto the power system flows.