Santiago Mazuelas obtains one of the Energy and Environment Research Grants from the Iberdrola Foundation

• The researcher will carry out a project on the use of artificial intelligence to improve the management of energy systems

The Iberdrola Foundation has awarded one of the Energy and Environment Research Grants to Santiago Mazuelas, Ramón y Cajal researcher (RYC-2016-19383) at BCAM and Ikerbasque. His project, which focuses on the use of Artificial Intelligence to predict future energy consumption, generation and prices, was one of the 20 selected by the foundation in the 2019 call for proposals.

In line with its commitment to promote research about energy and climate change, since 2011 the Iberdrola Foundation awards these Research Grants to young researchers who wish to develop their work in the energy, sustainability and environmental sectors within a university or research centre in Spain.

The project presented by Santiago aims to develop techniques of artificial intelligence and machine learning that allow more efficient management of energy systems by accurately predicting consumption, generation and price of energy in the future. This prediction represents a great technical and scientific challenge, as these factors vary very quickly and have a great impact. For example, generating more energy than will be consumed in the future results in an inefficient use of resources. On the contrary, generating less energy than will be needed in the future can result in supply losses. Likewise, decreases in energy prices increase losses caused by overestimating consumption.

The difficulty of making these predictions will increase in the coming years due to the growth of wind and solar power generation, as well as the rise of electric vehicles. Hence the importance of projects like Santiago’s that use probabilistic techniques and artificial intelligence to automatically process all the information present in the multiple available data sources.

About Dr. Mazuelas

Santiago Mazuelas received his PhD in Mathematics and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Valladolid in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Since 2017 he has been a researcher at BCAM - Basque Center for Applied Mathematics where he is part of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence area. Specifically, he works in the Machine Learning research line and he is a member of the Maths & AI working group. Before joining BCAM, he was a staff engineer in Corporate Research and Development at Qualcomm, and also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Information and Decision Systems Laboratory (LIDS), where he continues to collaborate as a research affiliate.

In April, he received the IEEE ComSoc RCC Early Achievement Award and he has also recently been awarded one of the BBVA Foundation's Leonardo Scholarships to support researchers and cultural creators with highly innovative scientific, technological or cultural production.

On behalf of the BCAM team, we would like to express our sincerest congratulations to Santiago for his latest achievement. We would also like to thank him for his many contributions to the center.