By Tor Bagger and Niels Landbo Krogh,  Communication and Public Affairs
Photo: Lars Horn, Baghuset

 

The global power grid is still based on the same basic rules and equipment as over 100 years ago, but as everything has become more electrified, there is a need to rethink the power grid. A team of researchers in Denmark and Germany have now received extensive financial support for this major task.

With a research grant (link in Danish) of over EUR 11 million from the European Research Council (ERC), Aalborg University and RWTH Aachen University in Germany will develop and test a new hardware and power system logic. Specifically, EUR 3.1 million (approx. DKK 23 million) will be channelled to Aalborg, where around ten employees will be hired and advanced equipment will be purchased.

”One of the reasons we need to advance this area is that we will need to expand the power grid quite a lot in the upcoming decades to make our energy supply much more climate friendly. While we have some ideas on how the power grid can be better utilized in the long run, so that we may be able to reduce the scale of the expansion, there are some things we need to get right before we can say whether it can succeed on the scale we hope for,” says Professor Frede Blaabjerg about the work that awaits him and the other researchers in the coming years.

The power plants of The Industrial Revolution with large synchronous generators resulted in transformers made of iron and copper to distribute the energy and connect everyone to a shared grid. If the entire grid fails, it affects a lot of consumers, and when the power grid of the future becomes much larger, failures will have major consequences. The new power grid structure that will be developed in the research project is founded on the use of electronic transformers based on electrical power semiconductors, which will enable the power grid to become more separated and more resilient to failures - partly inspired by the structure and flexibility of the internet. 

“Among other things, we get funding to better manage the energy in the power grid by using electronic transformers instead of the traditional transformers. We believe that by using electronic transformers, we can get the local electricity system - the distribution grid - to better utilise locally produced energy without having to send it far away. And if we get better at this, we can achieve a more secure grid in the long run,” explains Frede Blaabjerg.

This is the second time Blaabjerg has drawn an ERC project to AAU. His own research field, power electronics, is crucial to the new interdisciplinary project, which also includes expertise in power grid management, computer science and internet as well as business models for the new grid structure.

Another key figure in AAU's participation in the upcoming project is Assistant Professor Subham Sahoo, who researches electricity and AI.

“I was at MIT in Boston when we worked on the application and submitted it, but because of an excellent team of strong senior researchers, we already felt the synergy while working on it. Working with such extremely dedicated researchers, Sebastian Schwartz, Mirko Stoffers and Patrick Pollok from RWTH Aachen, was a great learning experience in itself. A cool team and a wildly ambitious and innovative scientific vision - that's music to the ears of any researcher,” says Subham Sahoo, who joined AAU Energy in 2019 after completing his PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and a postdoc at Nanyang Technology University in Singapore.

The large grant from the European Research Council is partly due to the international impact of the research, but part of the research will take place in North Jutland, where the broader society already has a focus on the challenges of the power grid of the future. For example, Business Region North Denmark is working towards centralised investment in expanding the capacity of North Jutland's power grid so that it can handle a fourfold increase in the capacity of onshore renewable energy by 2030. The organisation believes that the power grid in North Jutland has been under-prioritised for many years compared to the rest of the country, and that this is detrimental to the green transition and to job and growth opportunities in North Jutland.