Post by DTU-TotalEnergies Excellence Centre of Clean Energy (DTEC)

🎓 A Milestone for DTEC: Our First PhD Defense! We’re proud to celebrate a major achievement—DTEC’s very first PhD student, Charbel Assaad, has successfully defended his thesis! His research tackles one of the energy transition’s toughest challenges: how to design and operate hybrid power plants (HPPs) that combine wind, solar, and battery storage considering several uncertainties. Why does this matter? Hybrid power plants promise cleaner, more reliable energy without costly new transmission lines. But getting the mix right is complex—oversize one component and profits vanish; undersize another and you waste green electricity or pay penalties. Charbel developed an operations-aware design tool for HPPs that thinks like a market trader, optimizing both plant design and daily operations. Under the hood, surrogate models compress more than two years of high-fidelity simulations on a computing cluster into just minutes on a laptop, making this level of detail practical for industry use. Using real-world data from Denmark, Germany, and India, the research shows:   ✅ How detailed operational strategies can be integrated into plant design ✅ How uncertainties in technology costs and weather impact profitability ✅ How accounting for forecast errors can boost profits and reduce risk   The result? A methodology that helps developers, grid operators, and policymakers design hybrid plants that accelerate decarbonization at lower cost. Congratulations to Charbel, our PhD pioneer for turning hybrid power plants from concept into practical solution! This work arms industry with tools to build cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable power systems.   Charbel was also the most apt candidate for the DTEC collaboration: he came from a position as Engineer at TotalEnergies to make his PhD, and now is back in Paris to work for them again with the newly acquired knowledge.   #EnergyTransition #HybridPowerPlants #PhDDefense #Innovation #DTEC