Service de Physique de l'Etat Condensé

Description : National electrical power grids have been designed during the last century in slow evolving environments, where the supply was adjusted, without storage, to a relatively predictable consumption. However they are facing today to new challenges. Indeed, they have to include more and more renewable energy and they are more and more intricate at the continental scale. The supply-to-demand adjustment should become a tricky task and the resilience level of the network to more and more intermittent sources, has to be tested. In this context the recourse to the storage of the electrical energy will become a necessity. Although a large part of the storage technology is still under development, we would like to raise the question of the most efficient storage to secure the electrical supply?

We propose a physical approach to address some of these issues. Our goal is to build up the simplest model that allows reproducing the main ingredient of the electrical network complexity. It should include the topological complexity of the electrical network. On this grid one has to implement the dynamics of generators and motors which can be approximated first as coupled oscillators in a phase lock regime. The second step is to mimic the intermittency of renewable sources including their spatial spreading and their characteristic time scales. The resiliency of the network model and the phase lock has to be tested at this stage. Finally, we would like to increment a model of storage. In order to optimize the storage face to the supply-to-demand adjustment and the grid stability, the model should be able to monitor the global capacity of the storage, its spatial spreading and its characteristic time scales. In Parallel, Multi-Agent Simulations will be used to generate data and check to model relevance..

This research will be conducted at the laboratory SPEC/SPHYNX of the CEA-Saclay for a period of 12-18^th month. It will also involve the LIST laboratory and the G2E-lab of the INP Grenoble. We will promote candidate with a strong background on complex network, statistical physic and stability analysis but having also some affinities to the electro-technical aspects of the electrical power generation. He (She) will have to link simplified models, fundamental aspect of the graph theory and network stability to apply technology of the energy storage.