Prof. Federico Milano, IEEE Fellow of University College Dublin (UCD)

This Distinguished Lecture addresses one of the most critical challenges facing modern power systems: the reduction of system inertia due to the high penetration of inverter-based renewable energy resources.

The lecture is organized into three main parts. First, it presents an overview of several major blackouts that have occurred worldwide in recent years and explains their relationship to increasing renewable penetration, reduced physical inertia from synchronous machines, and the control behavior of inverter-based resources.

In the second part, the concept of providing “virtual inertia” using inverter-based resources is introduced from a rigorous analytical perspective. The lecture explains the fundamental mechanism linking frequency dynamics to voltage variations at network buses and illustrates these concepts through a set of numerical simulations using IEEE benchmark systems.

Finally, the lecture concludes with a real-world case study demonstrating inertia-like response from a large-scale battery energy storage system, followed by a discussion of how fast frequency response from such systems affects overall grid stability.

This lecture is particularly relevant for power system planners, protection and control engineers, and researchers working on low-inertia systems, renewable integration, and grid-forming technologies.

Biography:

Prof. Federico Milano is a distinguished expert in power systems engineering, currently serving as Professor of Power Systems Control and Protections at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. He holds an Electrical Engineering degree and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Genoa, Italy. Early in his career, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and later held faculty and research positions at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain before joining UCD in 2013. 

Professor Milano’s research focuses on power system modelling, stability, control, and dynamic analysis, with particular emphasis on the challenges posed by modern grids with high penetration of renewable energy and inverter-based resources. He is widely recognized for pioneering contributions in simulation tools and analytical methods that support advanced stability assessment and control strategies. 

He has authored and co-authored approximately 350 peer-reviewed publications and several influential books on power system analysis and modelling, and his work has been extensively cited by the technical community worldwide. 

Prof. Milano was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2016 for his contributions to power system modelling and simulation, and to IET Fellow in 2017. He was appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES), where he delivers expert presentations on advanced topics in power system dynamics and control. 

In addition to his research and teaching roles, he serves in senior editorial positions for leading journals, including as Co-Editor-in-Chief of IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution and Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, further shaping the field through high-impact scholarship and professional leadership.  

Email:

Address:Dublin, Ireland