SS21 Young Professionals Panel Session on Future Power System Workforce

ABSTRACT

The undergoing revolutionary change in power and energy sector has brought new concepts and challenges in operation, planning, and economics of future power and energy systems as we transition to clean, renewable, and low-carbon technologies. The current and upcoming Young Professionals thus need to develop a set of “general” and “technical” skills, relevant to the industry needs, to meet the challenges of emerging power and energy sector. This would also help young engineers increase their chance in securing job positions and keep the job offers rolling in. In this Panel Session, a wide range of skills and knowledge will be discussed, including technical expertise and knowledge (e.g., design/modelling/programming skills) required for most power engineering jobs related to grid connection studies, power system operation, power electronics, system planning, energy sector coupling, electricity markets, utilities, etc. Working in power and energy sector, some jobs may also require dealing with general public, local government, state agencies, and so on. Therefore, a set of general skills may be required, including communication skills, organizational and time-management skills, and so forth. Furthermore, it is important to discuss how a membership in certain international organizations, such as IEEE and CIGRE, could help the young generation of power and energy engineers with developing the required skills and the essential knowledge. This Panel Session will bring Young Professionals from all around the world together to share insights and their personal experiences to highlight the mentioned skills required for working in the sector, also discussing the challenges they faced when moving from academia to industry. This Panel Session is a unique venue since it is organized by Young Professionals for Young Professionals!

CHAIR

Dr Mehdi Ghazavi Dozein, University of Melbourne, Australia

SPEAKERS

Dr Marina Oluić, Swedish National Grid, Sweden

Dr Panos Kotsampopoulos, Senior Research Fellow, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Dr Saman Dadjoo Tavakoli, HVDC Control and Protection Engineer, Siemens Energy, Germany

Dr Jochen Cremer, TU Delft, Netherlands

Dr. Sleiman Mhanna, The University of Melbourne, Australia

SHORT BIO

	Mehdi Ghazavi Dozein received M.Sc. degree from University of Tehran and Ph.D. degree from The University of Melbourne. He is currently an Associate Lecturer in Power Systems at The University of Melbourne. His research interests include power system dynamics and stability, and modelling and control of inverter-based technologies.
	Marina Oluić (Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, in 2011 and 2012, respectively, and the joint Ph.D. degree in sustainable energy technologies and strategies from KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden), Comillas Pontifical University (Madrid, Spain) and Delft University of Technology (Delft, The Netherlands), in 2019. After continuing as a Postdoctoral Researcher at KTH (in the period 2019-2021), Marina joined the R&D Power Technology Section of the Swedish state-owned utility Vattenfall AB where she focused on the offshore power technology while also acting as Vattenfall’s R&D representative within Technical Working Group-Electrical (TWG-E) of the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA). As of May 2023, Marina is with the Swedish TSO (Svenska kraftnät) while she additionally serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Power Systems and Power Engineering (PES) Letters and represents Sweden in PES Women in Power (WiP). Her research interests include power system dynamics, stability & control as well as renewable generation & converter-interfaced technologies.
	Panos Kotsampopoulos received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer engineering and his PhD degree from NTUA in 2010 and 2017, respectively. He also graduated from the School of Education of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2020. Since 2010, he has been working on research projects at the Smart RUE research group of NTUA, where eis currently a senior researcher. He was a guest researcher at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) in 2012 and 2013. He is chair of the IEEE PES Task Force “Innovative teaching methods for modern power and energy systems” and active member of several IEEE and CIGRE Task Forces and Working Groups. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy and the journal of Energies. He is a chair of the IEEE Young Professionals Greece and co-founder of the energy community “Collective Energy”. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and recipient of the 2020 best paper award of the IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy. His research interests include real-time simulation, control of distributed energy resources, power system dynamics, microgrids, and engineering education.
	Saman Dadjo Tavakoli received his M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, in 2015. He joined Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2018 to pursue a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering. Since 2022, he has been with Siemens Energy as HVDC control and protection expert. His research interests include modern power system dynamics, advanced control system design for power converters, and hydrogen electrolyzers.
	Jochen Cremer directs the Delft AI Energy Lab as Assistant Professor of Intelligent Electrical Power Grids at the Technical University of Delft. He develops ML-based algorithms for real-time monitoring and control of electrical systems, and examples are state estimation, dynamic security, corrective control, and fast topological reconfigurations. He holds a PhD in Applied Machine Learning to power system security from Imperial College London. He worked at Carnegie Mellon and MIT, RWTH Aachen University, and China and Germany’s chemical and energy industry.
	Dr. Sleiman Mhanna is a Senior Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne working on designing mathematical models and scalable algorithms for the operation and planning of integrated electricity, gas, and hydrogen systems. The studies he has conducted over the past three years, which include electrification of residential heating demand and modelling of hydrogen blending in gas transmission networks, are currently used by Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre (FF CRC) and its industry partners in their policy initiatives and decarbonisation roadmaps. Dr Sleiman Mhanna received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Sydney in 2016 with emphasis on fast distributed methods in power systems and demand response pricing mechanisms. For the subsequent three years he was a research fellow at the same institution working mainly on the award-winning CONSORT project funded by ARENA, where he developed fast distributed optimisation methods and nonlinear pricing structures for load-side distribution network support. He is a senior member at IEEE and an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and for IEEE Power Engineering Letters