The GL Garrad Hassan PhD Award has been presented to Iñigo Martínez de Alegría of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, for his thesis “Study on Full Direct Current Offshore Wind Farm.”
Dr Andrew Garrad, Non-Executive Chairman of GL Garrad Hassan, awarded the prize to Dr. Martinez in recognition of his work examining the potential use of Direct Current (DC) grids in offshore wind farms. By introducing high frequency power transformers in the power stage of wind turbines and a fully DC integrated system for the elimination of power stage redundancies, the thesis aims to reduce the overall cost and power loss of offshore wind farms.
Dr. Martínez, an Associate Professor with the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication at the University of the Basque Country, is the co-author of 14 published papers in international journals, two patents and has participated in numerous research projects on power electronics and renewable energy.
GL Garrad Hassan founded the PhD award in 2012 in order to support research and development, teaching and the creation of new knowledge. The prize hopes to encourage the development of technology and processes which lead to more effective wind turbines and reduce the costs of renewable energy projects, to both generate more energy more effectively from the wind and ensure that more of this energy reaches consumers at a lower cost. The award is a cash prize of €5,000.
Eleven theses of outstanding quality from nine countries were submitted for consideration for the award. Innovation and cost of energy were the primary dimensions used by the evaluation committee to determine the winner. Some of the other thesis topics included predicting wind power in marine and coastal environments, the aerodynamics and near wake of an offshore floating horizontal axis wind turbine, optimizing thermal energy recovery, utilization and management in the process industries and performance evaluation of wave energy converters.