Risk approach to electricity grid storage innovations

Dr. Daniel Chartouni is the Head of the Energy & Materials Department  at the ABB Corporate Research Center in Baden-Daettwil, Switzerland. The department focuses on developing and applying new materials for ABB’s power products and on physics-related research  topics in energy transition and energy management. Parallel to leading the department, he was the Global Program Manager for the Energy Storage Research Program within the ABB Corporate Research organization.

From 2008 to 2012, Dr. Chartouni was Group Leader of the Applied Physics Group within the Electro-technology Department  at ABB Corporate Research. This group develops novel cooling solutions for power devices and supports the ABB Group on developing energy storage solutions. He joined ABB as a Scientist in 1999 after a one-year Post Doc on Fuel Cells at the Osaka National Research Institute, Japan. He earned  his Diploma and PhD degrees in Solid-State Physics from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

Norela Constantinescu, is Team Lead R&I and senior advisor Research and Innovation with European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). She is member of the Governing Board of European Technology and Innovation Platform Smart Networks for Energy Transition.  She is leading the work of ENTSO-E activities on research and innovation. She led the activity regarding ENTSO-E position on storage. Before she was working for 6 years with European Commission DG Energy leading on the Strategic Energy Technology Plan activities on low carbon technologies and Smart Cities and Communities. She obtained a Master Degree in energy engineering and she holds an MBA.

After studying engineering in France, Hubert Girault obtained in PhD in electrochemistry at Southampton University, England (1982). Since then, he has dedicated a major part of his research activities to the study of charge transfer reactions at liquid-liquid interfaces. In 1985, he moved to Edinburgh University, Scotland, where he has developed a strong interest in analytical chemistry, biosensors and separation methods in particular.

In 1992, he joined the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and worked on non-linear optical studies of interfaces and also on ionisation methods for mass spectrometry.

Recently, he moved to the new EPFL campus in Valais, Switzerland where he has established a demonstration site for large scale electrochemical storage, large scale hydrogen production and service station for electric vehicles.

Hubert Girault is external Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai since 2008. He has published more than 500 papers, 25 patents and a couple of textbooks on electrochemistry.

Michael Koller holds a Bachelors degree in Chemistry (ETH Zuroch and University of Toronto) and a Masters degree in Energy Science and Technology with distinction from ETH Zurich. He graduated top of his class at ETH and was awarded the Willi Studer prize.

He joined EKZ in 2011 and is currently responsible for EKZ’s R&D efforts and the application of technologies across the whole value chain of EKZ. Currently his focus areas include the development of advanced control strategies for distributed generation, battery storage and the provision of power system services by with virtual power plants.

EKZ is one of the largest electric utilities in Switzerland with a distribution grid supplying around 1 Million people with electricity in the Canton of Zurich. EKZ employs around 1400 people and operates along the whole value chain of the energy system (renewable generation, distribution grid, metering, electricity retail, heating&cooling, electrical installations).

Marcus is a postdoc in the Department of Strategy and Organization at the Technical University of Munich and a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (MIT CEEPR). His research covers advanced energy storage, lithium-ion batteries, renewable energy technology, energy policy and distributed ledger technologies. He studied electrical engineering and information technology (B.Sc. and M.Sc.11') in Munich with his doctoral thesis (Dr.-Ing.) on stationary lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (16').

Marcus is a TUM Executive MBA candidate ('17) on general management ans distributed ledger technologies.

Marcus also served as a Lieutenant first class in the Army Aviation branch within the German Armed Forces. Being an officer, he worked at the Airbus Innovation Center on all-electric aircraft technology.

Donald R. Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Department  of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science, M.A.Sc. in Chemical Metallurgy, and Ph.D. in Chemical Metallurgy are all from the Uni- versity of Toronto. He joined the MIT faculty in 1978. The author of over 160 scientific papers and holder of 23 U.S. patents, his research  is directed towards the development of rechargeable batteries as well as environmentally sound technologies for metals extraction. He is the founder of two compa- nies, Ambri and Boston Electrometallurgical. Online videos of his chemistry lectures hosted by MIT OpenCourseWare extend his impact on engineering education far beyond the lecture hall. Viewed 1,750,000 times, his TED talk is about inventing technology and inventing inventors. In 2012 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Philipp Sager studied Mechanical Engineering and Information Technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. After his theoretical education, he collected valuable field experience with the commissioning of Gas Turbines and Turbo Compressors for the companies ABB, Alstom and MAN Turbo. He also worked for the cement  company Hol- cim in the field of expert control systems and process optimization before he joint Swiss Re about 5 years ago. At Swiss Re, he started as an expert for machinery breakdown  claims. About one year ago, he internally moved from claims to the Risk Engineering Services (RES) department with the main focus on risk assessments in the power generation industry.

In May 2014, Greg was appointed to the Head of Global Engineering for Swiss Re.

Prior to this, he was Chief Property Underwriter for the US & Canada, a position which he held since 2008. In this role he successfully led a team of staff who were responsible for the underwriting performance of USD 2.0 billion premium in the US and the Canada property and natural catastrophe portfolio. Greg also held the position of Head of US Treaty Underwriting Property, where he was responsible for all underwriting analysis of Global, National and Specialty accounts.

Before joining Swiss Re in 1998, he was an underwriter with St. Paul Re.

Greg graduated from Fordham University in New York with a BS in Finance.

He is currently Chairman for American Nuclear Insurers.

Prof. Dr. Tobias Schmidt is the head of ETH Zurich’s Energy Politics Group. Tobias holds a Bachelor of Science and Dipl. Ing. (MSc equivalent) in electrical engineering (energy focus) from TU Munich and a PhD from ETH Zurich in management, technology, and economics. During his postdoc, he spent time as a visiting scholar at Stanford University and acted as consultant to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) working on UNDP’s De-risking Renewable Energy Investment (DREI) project.

In his research, which is published in journals like Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, Research Policy, or Global Environmental Change, he analyzes the interaction of energy policy and its underlying politics with technological change in the energy sector. One of his empirical focuses is energy finance and particularly investment risks.

Andreas Ulbig is co-founder and COO of ETH spinoff company Adaptricity, developing SmartGrid simulation tools and providing consultancy services mainly for distribution grid operators. He is a part-time lecturer for electric power systems at ETH Zurich and vice president of the Swiss Energy Foun- dation (SES). He is the main author of two scientific studies on the topic of electricity grids and energy storage for the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences SATW.

He received his M.Sc. from Supelec, Paris in 2006 and his Dipl.-Ing. degree in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart in 2007. Previous work positions include the R&D department of RTE, the French transmission grid operator, an academic stay at Caltech and the International Energy Agency (IEA). During his PhD studies at the Power Systems Lab of ETH Zurich, he was an academic visitor at PNNL (Advanced Power & Energy Systems) and the University of California, Berkeley (Energy and Resources Group) in the USA.

Victor K. Victorsson graduated in 2005 with a B.Sc. in Civil and Environmen- tal Engineering from Duke University, and in 2011 with a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from Stanford University. At Stanford, he worked as a researcher in the Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, with a focus on the seismic risk assessment and resilience of civil infrastructure. Victor joined Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd. in 2011 as an underwriter within their Global Engineering underwriting department. At Swiss Re, he has been a facultative and treaty underwriter with a focus on the UK /London insurance market.

Over the course of the years, he has been involved in the risk as- sessment and underwriting of numerous construction and operational risks worldwide, including combined cycle power plants, hydro power plants, on- and offshore windfarms and onshore solar farms. Prior to joining Swiss Re, he worked as a structural engineer in his native Iceland.

Dr. Giw Zanganeh is the head of energy storage technologies at AL ACAES SA, a highly innovative technology provider company for thermal and elec- trical energy storage systems. Under his supervision, AL ACAES successfully built and tested the worldwide first advanced adiabatic compressed air en- ergy storage (A A-CAES) pilot plant in Loderio, Switzerland, that eliminates any greenhouse gas emissions and achieves an efficiency of over 70% thanks to the incorporated proprietary thermal energy storage technology. Giw obtained his BSc, MSc, and PhD in mechanical engineering from ETH Zurich. His ideas and patents were used to raise funding for several cross-in- stitutional R&D projects for a total sum of more than €1.5 mio. In 2017, Giw was selected as one of the 200 Leaders of Tomorrow by the 47th St. Gallen Symposium Committee.