ERC Synergy Grant „SAFEr Grid“ awarded to COMSYS

Klaus Wehrle (COMSYS), along with Antonello Monti, Frank Piller (both RWTH) and Frede Blaabjerg from Aalborg University, has been awarded one of the most prestigious research funding grants from the European Research Council (ERC), the ERC Synergy Grant.

The SAFEr Grid principal investigators.

The ambitious goal of SAFEr Grid (Store-and-Forward Energy Grid) is to develop the foundations for a stable, resilient, efficient and scalable power grid in times of fully carbon-neutral and thus highly volatile and distributed energy generation and consumption. SAFEr Grid's interdisciplinary team of principal investigators is comprised of Klaus Wehrle (COMSYS), his RWTH colleagues Antonello Monti (ACS, EE Department) and Frank Piller (TIM, School of Business and Economics) as well as Frede Blaabjerg (Power Electronics, AAU Energy) from Aalborg University. Starting in April 2025, the project will be funded for six years with a budget of 11.2 million Euros.

Although the supply of electricity has been reliable for several decades, today's grid is challenged by increasing demand from the electrification of industry, mobility and thermal processes. At the same time, there is a steady increase in volatile and renewable generation, as well as the loss of much of the mechanical inertia that has served as an instantaneous energy reserve. Since today's power system infrastructure is rigidly coupled to a global synchronous frequency and requires synchronous power balancing, reliable and stable power supply will be at risk as the energy transformation reaches carbon neutrality.

SAFEr Grid will explore a new theory, architecture and operating principle for power systems. A fundamental paradigm shift will eliminate the synchronicity requirement by introducing decoupled and asynchronously operating subgrids that will perform asynchronous energy balancing. SAFEr Grid aims to provide a blueprint for a sustainable energy grid that is at the same time stable, scalable and incrementally deployable by making best use of existing infrastructure.

The ERC Synergy Grant team aims to create an innovative architecture for future power grids, which differs from traditional grids through asynchronous coupling and a store-and-forward principle. Inspired by the successful architecture and distributed operating principle of the Internet, COMSYS will contribute its expertise in Internet architecture, decentralized and secure coordination and control, and IT/cyber security to the project. 

The ERC was established by the European Commission to fund excellent frontier research, allowing awardees to undertake high-risk, high-reward research projects and tackle our society's global challenges.

COMSYS has already carried out two previous ERC-funded projects, SYMBIOSYS (ERC Consolidator Grant) and SAFE (ERC Proof of Concept), both focused on automated testing techniques that increase the reliability of software systems by enabling the detection of critical bugs at an early stage of development. Klaus Wehrle was the sole PI in both projects.

The ERC offers funding to individual PIs through its Starting, Consolidator and Advanced Grant schemes, each of which addresses a different career stage. Under the Synergy Grant scheme, the ERC funds projects proposed by a team of 2-4 PIs that aim to address research challenges that are so ambitious that they can only be addressed by an interdisciplinary approach. In addition, the Proof of Concept scheme aims at bringing the results of a previously funded ERC project closer to practical applications.

In the context of SAFEr Grid and other projects, COMSYS is hiring both PhD students and postdocs in the areas of Internet architecture, distributed systems, smart grid coordination, IT/cyber security and privacy research.