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- PhD Program in Electrical Power and Control Engineering
Addis Ababa University (AAU) and Swedish Universities (KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Chalmers University of Technology) are to work together in running Electrical Power and Control Engineering PhD programs in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Addis Ababa University. AAU is a degree-granting university and its professors are to be main supervisors for all PhD candidates while KTH and Chalmers professors are co-supervisors. PhD student supervisors and co-supervisors are to work together on student recruitment, student’s work planning and progress assessment through annual meetings and continuous correspondence. The Swedish professors will also support the Ethiopian professors in supervision capacity building facilitation for training and relevant seminars. Swedish universities’ professors are to support the programs by block teaching, as an external examiners, and by providing research space and facilities for the PhD candidates under their supervision and their Ethiopian counterpart professors according to an agreed upon schedule during the students’ study period. The program will accept four students in 2018 and eight students in 2019 enrolling twelve students over the five-year project period. Qualified female candidates are encouraged to apply and be part of the PhD candidates. At the end of the project, all the 12 enrolled students are expected to graduate improving staff profile of the universities’ in the country. Furthermore, 12 dissertations and more than 12 scientific papers, which are relevant to the real challenges of the country in the power and control area are expected to be produced by the PhD candidates.
There is dire need for teaching and research staff for more than 30 relatively newly established public universities in Ethiopia, which are at the moment dependent on expensive expatriate staffs. Ethiopia, as a country, is working hard to be an electric power pool of East Africa; exploiting its high renewable energy potential. It has 45GW hydropower potential, 5GW of geothermal, and a tremendous solar energy potential. At the moment, only 10% of the hydro and less than 0.1% of other potential resources have been developed with a total installed capacity of 4GW. During the present growth and transformation plan (GTP-II) of Ethiopia (2015/16-2020/21) it is planned to increase the installed generation capacity by fourfold to 17GW. More than 30 public universities are tasked to produce manpower for this huge expansion of the sector. Therefore, production of high level educated manpower for the electric energy sector, in general, and teaching and research staff for the public universities and high-level professionals for the expanding electric energy system in particular, is imperative to be addressed by this project.
To ensure the relevance of research and education to the industry, Ethiopian electric utility operators (Ethiopian Electric Utility EEU and Ethiopian Electric Power EEP) and ABB are part of this project. EEU and EEP participate in identifying relevant research projects, availing facilities and data for researchers and contributing financial and in-kind resources as required. Similarly, ABB is to receive and supervise students (industry internship) for a period of time, up to one year depending on time schedule to be agreed on by the student supervisors and the company. Power systems, High Voltage Engineering, Power system control, development and testing activities at ABB’s facilities in Ludvika and/or Vasteras are to be used for this purpose.
In parallel to running the PhD program, the laboratory facility at Electrical and computer engineering of Addis Ababa University is to be equipped replicating facilities at the similar Swedish professor´s laboratories as a capacity building for the sustainability of the programs.