Abstract:

The solar photovoltaic (PV) technology has faced lately remarkable growth worldwide and remains central in many countries’ strategic plan for decarbonization of the energy sector. This talk will present the findings of our recent white paper on the technical barriers deploying very high levels of PV generation into the electric grid, and a roadmap to overcome them. Further discussion will follow on specific research directions that relate to making the PV systems more “grid-friendly” and more easily accommodatable in the power system. These involve: keeping power reserves in PV systems without energy storage, integrating supercapacitors in PV inverters, grid-forming control in PV systems, and improved grid voltage regulation by inverters.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Stratis Batzelis is a Lecturer with the school of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. He has been working in the fields of Power Electronics and Power Systems with particular expertise in solar photovoltaic systems. Stratis is currently a research fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering working on solar integration challenges in developing countries. Prior to that, he held an EU Marie-Curie fellowship at Imperial College London in 2017-2019 and he received his PhD degree from the National Technical University of Athens (Greece) in 2016. He is a Senior IEEE member and currently serves as an Associate Editor in IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. His research interests involve integration of renewable and distributed energy resources, especially solar photovoltaics and inverter-based generation, power converters control and power system stability.