Master's thesis on european electricity pricing

Department of Mechanical Engineering is looking for Unite! students

2022/07/21

The Institute for Mechatronic Systems of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the TU Darmstadt is looking for a Unite! student who is interested in doing a Master's thesis on European electricity pricing. The institute will provide supervision both on-site (Erasmus programme) and virtually (without exchange programme).

Rising electricity costs, the transition to renewable energies and higher demand for energy due to urbanization require smarter use of storage technologies. To optimize the energy usage, measures such as the combination of storage technologies for applications like peak shifting are considered in the industry. However, electricity prices are generally different in Europe. In Germany, for instance, the peak load considerably affects the electricity bill and therefore peak shifting facilitates energy cost savings. On the other hand, the electricity bill in other European countries is less dependent on the peak load and therefore different operating strategies are reasonable there. Therefore, as part of this work, a state of the art research that brings together the different price specifications over the European countries shall be carried out. Subsequently, the pricing conditions shall be modeled and the saving potential shall be assessed using a simplified energy storage model.

Tasks:

  • Research on industrial electricity pricing in various European countries
  • Implementation of electricity price models in a programming language
  • Implementation of a simplified energy storage model for the investigation of peak-shifting
  • Estimation of the saving potential
  • Critical consideration and documentation of the results

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of Matlab/Simulink or Python

Organizational:

Interested persons please contact and/or by e-mail by 30 September 2022.

If there is no enrolment at TU Darmstadt, a co-supervising professor at the enrolled university is required. Erasmus+ students are welcome.

Panagiotis Mouratidis/mho

About Unite!

Alongside TU Darmstadt as the coordinator, Unite! (University Network for Innovation, Technology and Engineering) also includes Aalto University (Finland), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Grenoble Institute of Technology (France), Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain) and Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal).

The seven partner universities aim to use the European University to create a trans-European campus for students and researchers with the involvement of regions and companies. The partners have a total of 167,000 students, already cooperate closely in more than 80 EU projects and have exchanged more than 2,000 students in the past five years. The alliance has set itself the goal of combining courses for the benefit of students, breaking down existing technical and administrative hurdles, and thus significantly increasing student mobility. Research will also benefit from the conditions created for larger and easier cooperation, which will strengthen the competitiveness of the European Higher Education Area overall.