SNSF highlights GridSteer as a success story
Updated: Jul 7, 2021
SNSF's annual report “Profile 2019-2020” points out GridSteer as one of the three lab-to market highlights
Gridsteer: Jagdish Achara (CEO), Jean Yves Le Boudec (researcher, professor EPF Lausanne) and Mario Paolone (researcher, professor EPF Lausanne). The Gridsteer system regulates electricity flow in regional distribution grids.
On May 6th, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) published its annual report. At year-end 2019, 5,750 SNSF-funded projects were underway involving 18,900 researchers. From those projects, SNSF highlighted 3 success stories for lab-to-market solutions, including EPFL-DESL's spin-off GridSteer.
GridSteer is commercializing the Commelec solution developed in the frame of the SCCER-FURIES. The main goal of the Commelec solution is to compute optimal power setpoints for a heterogeneous set of energy resources (independent of their nature), while ensuring that the grid operates in feasible conditions, namely, respecting static operational constraints on nodal voltages and line currents. This solution is validated at the SCCER-FURIES REeL demo enabling the company to control the demonstration site’s energy resources such as batteries, heat pumps and boilers in order to reduce users’ energy costs and increase the energy autonomy of each system.
The other two success stories are Ophthorobotics commercializing a fully automated device for giving eye injections and Cocoboards promoting innovative and sustainable building materials.