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John Lygeros, Professor of Control and Computation at the Automatic Control Laboratory, was awarded the 2016 Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching and Tobias Schmidt, Professor of Energy Politics received the Golden Owl award. It honours lecturers who have provided exceptional teaching and motivates them to continue with their excellent teaching.

With the target to reduce CO₂ emissions, conventional large scale power plants will be gradually replaced by distributed renewables. The increasing integration of these renewables entails power quality problems such as voltage fluctuations especially in the 400V low voltage distribution grid. New concepts as the hybrid transformer enable to maintain the desired power quality even with a high share of renewable generation. 

Demand-side management will play a key role for improving reliability and efficiency in an increasingly complex grid, balancing large demands, e.g., caused by electric vehicles. We develop techniques that automatically compute optimal load profiles, taking into account network and user requirements, and most importantly varying load connectivity.

45% of electricity generated from renewables by 2030 is targeted in Europe. As wind-generated electricity will be a substantial portion of this new generation, reducing the cost of wind-generated electricity is imperative. We have developed a novel large-scale measurement system that provides for optimised micrositing of wind turbines in new wind farms.

Control reserves are power generation or consumption entities that ensure balance of supply and demand of electricity in real-time. The reserves are procured through a market mechanism in which entities provide bids on power capacities and corresponding prices. We have been developing game theory, control and optimization methods to address efficiency of these markets.