: AI Center of Excellence - Working student or intern in Computational Electrical Engineering (f/m/d)

The Elia Group transports electricity at extra-high voltage level. Two large European power grid operators make up the group: Elia in Belgium and 50Hertz in north-eastern Germany. Together we are an international team of 2500 colleagues. It is our task to realise the climate targets of the European Green Deal. Elia Group is therefore accelerating its investment programme. We are preparing our onshore and offshore grid infrastructure for the integration of large amounts of renewable energy to electrify our society in a sustainable way.

Speed up our load flow calculations so we can ensure a high integration of renewables into our grid.

The intern position is placed in an ongoing research & development project aimed at lowering the increasing redispatch costs in the grid (cf. 4,2 billion € in Germany in 2022). The project is exploring the possibility of using Reinforcement Learning to develop a grid-topology optimizer, aiming to ease grid congestion and reduce costs for grid operation. For Reinforcement Learning to be viable on the scale of a real-world grid, we must be able to increase the speed and scale of the calculations simulating what the flow of electricity would be at each time step. The intern position focuses on developing new computational techniques and algorithms for this area of the project.

💻 Your tasks 💻

• Working on novel methods to accelerate grid load-flow calculations,
  
• Working with grid data to ensure the real-world applicability of these methods,
• Optimize existing grid analysis computations on massively parallel hardware,
• Perform benchmarks for detection of bottlenecks and quantitative evaluation.

👨‍💻 Your profile 👩‍💻

• You are an enrolled student of electrical engineering, computer science, data science, mathematics, statistics, physics, or a related field,
• Python (required), Pandapower (nice-to-have), Jax (nice-to-have),
• Knowledge of parallel programming patterns and massively-parallel hardware (GPUs),
• Experience with porting algorithms (nice-to-have),
• Knowledge in electrical engineering,
• Good communication skills in an international (European) environment,
• Be highly motivated, creative, independent in working and a team player,
• Have a high analytical ability combined with a systematic working approach, as well as a high level of self-organisation and reliability,
• Fluent in English – additional languages such as German, French or Dutch are a plus,
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office (especially Excel and PowerPoint).