Luka Smajila

Research in:

• Energy Storage Systems (Emphasis on Batteries and Stationary Applications
  • Ancillary Services
  • Energy Arbitrage
  • Load Management (Levelling, Peak Shaving)
• Environmental impact modelling
  • Stemming from my experience with LCA
• System operation modelling and optimisation

Book a meeting with me if you are interested in scientific, or industrial, collaboration and want to know more about what I do.

https://meetings-eu1.hubspot.com/luka-smajila

Energy is environmentally damaging. Can we change that?

Energy is at the centre of all human activities, whether we are producing, distributing, converting, using, or recovering it. Consequently, it is one of the largest contributors to the environmental impact of our society. This also presents an opportunity to explore how we can minimise our environmental footprint upstream of many human processes, allowing us to continue to grow and prosper while inflicting less damage with our activities. When it comes to electric energy, renewable energy sources offer a great promise of minimising this impact by providing cheap and clean electricity. However, they fail to solve all the problems that lie at the centre of something that we characterise by naming it the energy trilemma. This trilemma is characterised by its three pillars of making the energy: cheap, secure, and clean. As renewables are intermittent, energy security is still a problem.  I am investigating how energy storage can be used to solve this problem while ensuring that our energy remains affordable, and more importantly, that it helps us further minimise our environmental footprint.

My research is structured around 3 axioms:

1. Reducing environmental impact in infrastructure & activities upstream, is better than limiting production and consumption downstream.
2. Analysis is good, but expanding scope, optimising systems and forecasting performance is better.
3. Applications and use-cases that minimise environmental impact without limiting progress & performance should be prioritised.

By using stationary energy storage systems (SESS), such as grid-connected batteries, we can further expand the use of the clean and cheap energy that is produced at different times and in different applications. This shows promise to help start driving down the environmental impact of our energy use while making that energy more available when we need it as well. In my work, we try to connect this with the crucial component of understanding how such systems behave when in use and how they interact with the different (larger) systems they are a part of. Apart from my work in scientific research, I am also very interested in entrepreneurship, investing, and financing the very opportunities we are investigating, further ensuring these projects can be implemented in the most responsible and mutually beneficial ways, as well as keeping an active lifestyle with exploring and reading about the world we live in.

You can also connect with me via LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/lukasmajila).