RTE - Centrale Nantes Chair

Power grids today have to address new challenges within the context of energy transition, alongside developments in consumption and production and the large-scale integration renewable energies, which are both decentralised and random in nature. Within this more complex technological environment, on both a national and European scale, RTE is adapting its load centres and its network in order to continue to ensure the supply/demand balance, whilst allowing the whole power system to become more flexible. The integration of new technical components within the network and the factoring in of changes in the electricity production mix require large-scale simulations to be undertaken on the dynamic behaviour of the European power system.

The unprecedented combination in the chair of two scientific disciplines -automatic control and electrical engineering - will allow Centrale Nantes, one of the first engineering schools, and RTE, which runs maintains and develops the high- and very high-voltage network to develop new simulation, analysis and control tools for the future surveillance and control of the electricity transport network.

The innovative nature of the research work also relates to the scale on which the network will be represented and its dynamic nature. Whilst simulation models do already exist for large networks, calculation times are currently too long for them to be used in real-time.

With a budget of €4 million, the Chair's research activites are supervised at Centrale Nantes by Professor Bogdan Marinescu.

He will be supported by IRCCyN (1) and GeM (2), two CNRS (3) research institutes supervised by Centrale Nantes, which are internationally recognized in the areas of automatic control, numerical calculation and simulation.

(1) IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes -Communication and Cybernetics Research Institute of Nantes
(2) GeM - Institut de Recherche en Génie Civil et Mécanique - Research Institute in Civil and Mechanical Engineering
(3) CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique - National Center for Scientific Research

We are developing the technical solutions essential for the uptake of energy transition. We are thus building the smart grids of tomorrow said Olivier Grabette, deputy managing director of RTE. This is the first time that automatic control and power grids have been brought together within a chair with the aim of developing new tools for the future surveillance and control of the electricity network.

This research programme is a major project for Centrale Nantes. It is in line with and a perfect complement to our research projects and development on renewable energies and the position of Nantes and the Pays de la Loire region on Marine Renewable Energies stated Arnaud Poitou, Director of Centrale Nantes. The modern approaches to automatic control and numerical simulation developed in recent years by our researchers have found a new field of application thanks to this chair.

This innovative chair is also an ambitious research programme which will welcome a dozen master, PhD and post-doc students added Bogdan Marinescu. We aim to expand collaboration internationally and to thus create a breeding ground for and expertise in power systems. We expect this programme to have a significant impact in terms of technology transfer.