PhD defense alert: Seyed Soroush Karimi Madahi

Data-Driven Implicit Energy Balancing Algorithms for Battery Energy Storage Systems

You are invited to join the PhD Defense of: Seyed Soroush Karimi Madahi

Name: Seyed Soroush Karimi Madahi

Title: Data-Driven Implicit Energy Balancing Algorithms for Battery Energy Storage Systems

Topic:

The global transition toward renewable energy is drastically changing how our electricity grids operate. While solar and wind power are vital for decarbonization, their weather dependent nature introduces massive unpredictability. In power grids, supply and demand must match perfectly every second to prevent problems. Traditionally, system operators handled this balance, but the burden is shifting. Today, market players are incentivized to help balance the grid actively using large-scale batteries, a strategy known as implicit balancing.

This thesis develops advanced, data-driven solutions to enable implicit balancing for batteries. We investigated and improved existing model predictive control and reinforcement learning solutions for implicit balancing. To leverage the complementary strengths of both approaches, we proposed a novel hybrid method to control batteries for reducing their imbalance cost. The proposed AI-driven strategies were successfully validated on both simulated and real-world battery systems, demonstrating significantly higher profitability and reliability than traditional methods.

Curriculum Vitae Soroush Karimi:

Soroush Karimi obtained his Bachelor's and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering in 2018 and 2021, respectively, from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

In August 2022, he began his PhD at IDLab within the AI4E team, under the supervision of Prof. Chris Develder and Prof. Bert Claessens. During this period, he also spent four months as a visiting researcher at TU Delft in the Netherlands, working in the research group of Prof. Kenneth Bruninx.

His doctoral research focused on developing data-driven and AI-based solutions for energy problems, with a specific emphasis on battery arbitrage in electricity markets.

Throughout his PhD, he co-authored 15 academic papers. As a first author, his contributions include one peer-reviewed international journal article, six peer-reviewed international conference papers, and one international journal paper currently under review. In addition to his scientific contributions, he was actively involved in supervising three Master's theses.

Date defense: 7 September  | 5 PM

Place: Jozef Plateau, Auditorium P, Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Ghent

Online: Link to follow online