Summer School on

Future Energy Systems

Informatics, Economics & Engineering

Summer School Postponed until 2021 due to the current Covid-19 Situation, this site will be updated as soon as more information becomes available

Abstract

Developing a future proof energy system requires rethinking how energy is distributed, managed, traded, used and governed. The transition into an intelligent, decentralised and decarbonised energy system comes with many challenges: load balancing due to the intermittent nature of renewable sources, unexpected generation peaks, new types of consumers (such as electric vehicles), novel security risks due to the increased use of information technology, and an energy market not optimised for real-time trading. Dealing with these challenges effectively is only possible in a multidisciplinary approach that combines expertise from the fields of informatics, economics and engineering. This cooperation offers a unique opportunity to synergise knowledge from different disciplines and find innovative solutions for a sustainable, secure and equitable future energy system.

Following the success of the inaugural “Future Energy Systems”summer school in 2017, the second iteration with the title “Future Energy Systems: Informatics, Economics & Engineering” focuses on exploring synergies between methods and tools from multiple disciplines to facilitate future energy systems. The summer school will provide an interdisciplinary platform for graduate students, researchers and industry experts from various disciplines to discuss urgent problems and explore the challenges of future energy systems from different perspectives.

The summer school is organised by the DFGResearch Training Group “Energy Status Data”. In addition to keynote speeches by leading researchers in the field of future energy systems, impulse presentations and interactive workshops will give an end-to-end perspective on how synergies from energy informatics, energy economics and engineering can be used to design sustainable energy systems.

Organizers

Research Training Group "Energy Status Data – Informatics Methods for its Collection, Analysis and Exploitation"

The research-training group is funded by the German National Science Foundation (DFG) with funds from the Federal Government and the German states. It has started on May 1st 2016 and has a duration of 4.5 years.

An essential aspect is the consumption of energy, particularly of complex systems such as factories or IT infrastructures. Important points are the flexibilization of energy consumption, so that the share of locally generated 'green' energy increases, robustness of energy provisioning, or the efficient design of new energy systems serving these purposes. To accomplish this, a core prerequisite is a structured collection, storage and analysis of energy status data. Energy status data describes the provisioning of energy, its storage, transmission and consumption, be it the outcomes of measurements, be it metadata such as the extent of fatigue of batteries, be it other relevant data such as electricity rates.

This Research Training Group targets at the handling of energy-status data. To this end, an interdisciplinary approach (computer science, engineering, economics, law) is indispensable. It reveals new scientific challenges our Ph.D. students are confronted with as part of their education. For instance, we have observed that different planning and control purposes require data of different temporal resolution and at different aggregation levels. This varying granularity leads to the question how to find outliers in such data at the right level of abstraction. Other graduates benefit from new approaches that detect such outliers. They can now work more efficiently, e.g., can identify shortcomings of existing models of energy systems systematically. An example of such a model would be one describing the behavior of Li-Ion batteries. The infrastructure for energy research of the KIT Helmholtz sector such as the EnergyLab 2.0 will be subject/object of the Research Training Group to a significant extent; the persons responsible for these facilities are part of the principal investigators of this Research Training Group.

Contact

If you have any questions regarding the summer school, please feel free to contact us via mail: future-energy-systems ∂ energystatusdata.kit.edu