Bodossaki Distinguished Young Scientist Award 2021
Academic field:
Applied Science / Technology: Alternative and Renewable Energy, Environmental and Natural Resources Management, Low Carbon Emission Technologies, Energy Efficiency and Conservation
“I am grateful to Bodossaki Foundation for placing renewable energy sources and sustainable development at the forefront of applied sciences in this year’s award ceremony, as environmental protection and energy security are emerging as key and pressing challenges for our country. For me, it is a great honour to represent here, today, the Greek scientific community that works in this field and is rising to this technological challenge.”
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Antonis Papavassiliou is Assistant Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. His work focuses on operational research, with applications in the large-scale penetration of renewable energy sources in power systems and the analysis of electricity markets.
He was born in Michigan, USA, in 1983. With family roots in Syros, Santorini and Fthiotida, he grew up in Athens. In 2001 he was admitted to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, from which he graduated in 2006. He went on to pursue doctoral and post-doctoral studies at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California at Berkeley. He began his professional career as an academic teacher at UCLouvain in 2013, where he was Associate Professor and holder of the ENGIE Chair until his return to Greece in 2022.
In 2017 he was awarded the Bauchau Prize of UCLouvain and in 2018 the Research Professorship of the Francqui Foundation. In 2019, he was funded by the highly competitive five-year Starting Grant programme of the European Research Council (ERC). His research in daily energy planning algorithms and electricity market design has won distinctions in 2015 and 2021 from the Institute of Operational Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). In 2020, his first doctoral graduate won the Grid Optimization Competition organised by the US Department of Energy.
He has served as assistant editor of the Operations Research and IEEE Transactions on Power Systems journals, and as a member on the programme committees of numerous international conferences. His research work has contributed, inter alia, to the implementation of dynamic back-up sizing in Belgium and to the promotion of the scarcity pricing mechanism in the European balancing market.
As the very ambitious recent decisions of the European Union regarding the non-dependence on fossil fuels and Europe’s energy transformation have shown, energy security, the economic functioning of power systems and the protection of the environment require the large-scale penetration of renewable energy sources in electricity systems. Given that sources of energy such as wind and solar cannot possibly be controlled by humans, the research work of Antonis Papavassiliou aims at their seamless absorption through the development of algorithms for optimizing production, pricing and flexible electricity consumption. He collaborates extensively with electricity network managers, energy regulators, energy exchanges, energy producers and think tanks in Europe and internationally, on issues such as electricity market design, backup services, real-time balancing of electricity systems and access to power networks.
