The HVDC-WISE project is happy to introduce the second project webinar ‘Methodologies & tools for simulating future reliable and resilient hybrid AC/DC systems‘, to be held on Thursday, March 21st, at 3 pm (CET). 

To ensure that future electrical grids, with significant high voltage AC and DC interconnections, can be designed in a reliable and resilient fashion, suitable analysis methodologies and tools need to be developed. In this webinar, we’ll first identify some of the key needs that will drive the development of these methodologies and tools, as identified in the HVDC-WISE project. Then presentations will be made on methodological and tool developments to enable reliable and resilient system design, showing some of the latest results from the project. 

This one-hour free webinar will feature presentations from the project partners Paul McNamara (EPRI Europe, Ireland), Diego Cirio (RSE, Italy), and Hashemi Seyedsina (University of Cyprus, Cyprus). The webinar will be chaired by the HVDC-WISE WP5 (Simulation tools) lead Lukas Sigrist (Comillas University, Spain). 

This webinar will primarily highlight aspects of the third project deliverable, now publicly available at Zenodo.   

➡ Deliverable 5.1: Scope and specifications of the tools and model needs 

About the speakers 

Paul McNamara, PhD, is a Technical Leader with EPRI Europe, based in Dublin, Ireland, where he performs research on resilient and integrated transmission system planning approaches, working within the P40C research stream. Paul has previously worked in planning and Data roles in the Irish TSO Eirgrid, and spent a number of years in academia, attaining his PhD in centralized and distributed optimal control of smart grids in 2012. Paul is the project lead for EPRI in the HVDC-WISE project, leading WP8 (dissemination and exploitation) and has made significant contributions in setting the project scope in WP2 (Requirements, opportunities, frameworks and demonstration needs for R&R of future AC/DC systems). 

Diego Cirio received the M.Sc. degree (1999) and Ph.D. degree (2003) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Genoa, Italy. He leads the “Grid Development and Security” Research Group at “Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico – RSE S.p.A.” (Milano, Italy). He has been active in EU and national research projects on power system resilience, security, planning, adequacy, risk, HVDC, flexibility, ancillary services, also supporting the Italian Authority for energy, the Ministry for Environment and Energy Security, and the TSO. He contributed to CIGRE WGs of SC C2/C4, IEEE WG on Cascading failure, and IEA WGs on transmission systems (ENARD, ISGAN). He has been an IEEE Senior Member since 2013. 

Sina Hashemi joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus in 2022 as a Post-Doctoral Researcher. Currently, he serves as the lead researcher on two tasks from WP5 (Cascading event quantification and operational mitigation strategies) and WP6 (Definition of the R&R-oriented methodology for the use cases) within the HVDC-WISE project. Previously, he contributed to other research projects focused on power grid operational planning for improving voltage stability. His research primarily involves assessing, mitigating, and restoring power systems to enhance operational resilience and stability, particularly in the context of cascading blackouts.