Niklas Hartmann was born on February 10th 1981 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
From 2001 until 2007 Niklas Hartmann studied industrial engineering, specialized in field mechanical engineering, at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. He gained professional experience in the field of energy generation and automotive electronics during several internships, such as at Liebherr-France in Colmar, Siemens Thailand Ltd. in Bangkok and Arthur D. Little in Munich, Germany. In 2007 he finished his diploma thesis "Economic analysis of thermal and electrical solar cooling options" at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Freiburg. Since March 2008, Niklas Hartmann works as a PhD research student at the Institute of Energy Economics and the Rational Use of Energy (IER) within the department System Analysis and Renewable Energies (SEE) at the University of Stuttgart. Beside his work in the field of "grid-integration of large amounts of wind energy" he developed the concept for his dissertation project.
Due to the fluctuating character of wind and solar electricity generation backup energy, which consists primarily of fossil fired power plants, has to be held on disposition. These backup power plants operate mainly in inefficient partial load range. This results, next to the usage of fossil fired power plants, in additional greenhouse gas emissions. With the further development of solar and wind energy in Germany, this problem will increase. In particular wind energy (onshore and offshore), which is expected to reach a capacity of 65 GW in Germany by the year 2030 /BMU/, will constitute a large proportion of the total generated electricity. Balancing the fluctuating renewable energy generation with storage technologies will reduce the amount of needed backup energy. Therefore, by deploying efficient storage technologies to compensate for the fluctuating character of renewable electricity generation a high penetration of renewable energy generation without fossil fired backup can be reached, which will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.
The goal of the dissertation project is to evaluate and analyse the integration of large amounts of fluctuating energy generation from renewable energies which result in an reduction of fossil fired backup energy.
Within the scope of the dissertation project, promising alternatives of stationary storage systems will be compared to mobile storage systems (mainly secondary Li-Ion batteries). After the introduction of high powered secondary batteries in hybrid electric vehicles and different vehicle concepts such as Plug-In-hybrid and electric vehicles the overall storage power and storage capacity of vehicles will rise. A large deployment of vehicles with high storage capacity will enlarge their possible utilization to compensate for the fluctuating character of renewable electricity generation.
Based on the technical simulation of the renewable electricity generation combined with the storage technologies and their integration into the grid the dissertation project will be expanded by an economic and ecologic analysis. The focus of the analysis thereby is the detection of costs of mobile storage systems as well as their environmental compatibility.
The supervisor of the dissertation project is Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alfred Voß. He is the director of the Institute of Energy Economics and the Rational Use of Energy (IER) at the University of Stuttgart
