June 6, 2:00pm
Location: Santa Clara II

AI Potential for a Sustainable and Efficient Energy Future

The energy industry has been experiencing huge changes along recent years, driven by the need for a more sustainable energy future. With a significant increase in the use of renewable energy sources and a clear trend towards the increased electrification of the sector, different planning and operation methods are required to address the new challenges. Smart grids are facing problems with increased distributed nature, as distributed generation, active consumers, electric vehicles, and distributed storage become key elements in the sector. Artificial Intelligence concepts and methods have a huge potential to bring effective solutions ensuring the fair and efficient participation of all the involved actors, from small consumers and energy communities to large utilities. Data driven and knowledge-based approaches can ensure the required distributed decision support and real-time management of the energy resources in the frame of competitive wholesale and local electricity markets. Artificial Intelligence models are needed to enable the energy transition process, ensuring not only adequate approaches for efficient energy use but also bringing a human centric paradigm to the energy business.

Zita Vale graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1986, received the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1993, and the Agregação title (Habilitation) in 2003 from the University of Porto, Portugal. She is Full Professor in the School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto. She is a member of the Coordination Board of LASI – The Associated Lab on Intelligent System and leads the research activities on Intelligent Power and Energy Systems at GECAD – Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development. She has been involved in more than 60 R&D projects and published more than 200 papers in international scientific journals. Her scientific research activities mainly focus on Artificial Intelligence models for Power and Energy Systems Operation, Electricity Markets, Demand Response, Renewables, Electric Vehicles, and Distributed Generation and Storage. She has been developing models, methods and applications for Power and Energy, using Agents and Multi-Agent systems, Knowledge-Based systems, Semantics, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Evolutionary Computation. Zita Vale actively participates in several technical working groups and committees. She is the Chair of the IEEE PES Intelligent Data Analysis and Mining (IDMA) Working Group and of the Open Data Sets (ODS) Task Force. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of ISAP – Intelligent Systems Application to Power Systems.  She is co-Editor-in-Chief of Applied Energy and has editing responsibilities in several other journals, has edited several books and has regular activity as reviewer and evaluator for papers and for project proposals and monitoring, from different funding agencies around the world.