Students from Germany, Poland, and Portugal are taking a STARS EU course on smart grids at the ULL

This week, the University of La Laguna is hosting the in-person portion of a course on smart grids and blockchain in energy, promoted within STARS EU, coordinated by Professor Benjamín González of the Department of Industrial Engineering. For this reason, 15 master’s degree students from three partner universities in the alliance—the Krakow University of Technology (Poland), the Hochschule Bremen – City University of Applied Sciences (Germany), and the Polytechnic University of Bragança (Portugal)—in addition to the enrolled local students, traveled to the School of Engineering and Technology, where the course is held.

The Director of the Internationalization Secretariat, Judit Mendoza, welcomed the new students, inviting them to enjoy the experience and take advantage of the opportunity to exchange ideas and expand their knowledge. Also present at the opening were two professors from the Portuguese institution: Ângela Ferreira, the founder of this course, which is in its second edition this year (2025), and José Lima.

Ferreira herself explained that “smart grids” are electrical infrastructures with a high degree of digitalization, capable of supporting real-time operations and combining monitoring and automatic control actions to help preserve system integrity. “They are very important today; we saw this with the recent blackout that affected Spain and Portugal, so the idea of ​​this course is to explore tools for understanding, designing, operating, and optimizing modern electrical systems that integrate digital technology, communication, and renewable energy sources.”

During her opening remarks, Ferreira conducted a roundtable discussion in which the students introduced themselves and shared their personal and academic interests. At that point, she expressed her satisfaction with the fact that a third of the attending students were female, an encouraging indicator given the low female presence in so-called STEM degrees.

Visits, presentations and collaborative projects

Benjamín González introduced the content of these in-person sessions, which will run until Thursday, May 29th. These sessions will include a visit to the facilities of the Institute of Renewable Energy Technology (ITER) and the host school’s laboratories; the presentation of initiatives such as the European project on energy communities, Satcomm; the technical master’s degrees from the University of La Laguna; and the development of collaborative group work by students, which will be presented together.

This course follows the format of the Blended Intensive Courses (BIP) of the Erasmus+ initiative, in which students receive intensive, online instruction on a very specific topic from instructors from all the universities involved. Smart Grids, which began in February, is now being held in person on the University of La Laguna campus. The course is also part of one of the thematic interest groups (TIG) that articulate STARS EU’s activities, the Energy Transition group, led by the University of La Laguna, with Benjamín González as coordinator.