Public electric transport grids are oversized and underutilized to account for the infrequent worst-case traffic scenarios. Motivated by the power grid congestion problems and enabled by the advances in power electronics and smart grid technologies, a growing research momentum is re-thinking transport infrastructures as smart, multi-functional backbones to the urban power grid. This is done by integrating renewables, storage, and EV chargers into them, while keeping in mind the power and energy priority of both the present and the future transport vehicles fleets. This lecture would look at lessons learnt from studying the trolleybus grid of Arnhem and the metro grid of Amsterdam, and the technical and non-technical challenges facing urban public transport electrification as a whole.
About Ibrahim Diab
Ibrahim is a PhD candidate at the DC systems, Energy conversion and Storage (DCE&S) group in the Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy (ESE) at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He received his bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 2012. He then worked as a Measurement-While-Drilling engineer with Schlumberger in Saudi Arabia until August 2014.
In 2015, he received the TU Delft “Delft Research Initiative – Energy” full scholarship and joined the ESE department as a master student under the Sustainable Energy Technologies (SET) masters program. After graduating, he started with the DCE&S group as a full-time teaching assistant on courses on AC and DC Microgrids, Electrical Power Conversion, and on the System Integration project. He then worked as a co-creator and manager for the Professional Certificates online courses of the ESE department on Intelligent Electrical Power Grids, and on Electrical Power Conversion.
Since July 2019, he is working with the DCE&S group as a PhD candidate on transforming the trolleybus grid into an active, sustainable, and multi-functional transport grid of the future. Since September 2022 he is also a research fellow at the AMS institute in Amsterdam working on the integration of E-bus chargers in the metro grid of Amsterdam.
