SUMMER INTERNSHIP DEVELOPS DOWNSCALING METHODS FOR RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY GENERATION AND ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION

Between 15 June and 4 September 2026, Nuno Penedo, a student of Electrotechnical and Computer Engineering from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, completed a summer internship at R&D Nester related to the work developed on the EnergyGuard Project.

The main objective of the internship was to develop methods for downscaling renewable generation and consumption data to be used in the implementation of the R&D Nester’s Digital Twin of a large-scale electric grid with high share of renewables.

During the internship, Nuno developed and implemented methods enabling the downscaling of national profiles of wind and photovoltaic electricity generation to each substation, according to the regional profiles and connection limits for each technology at each substation.

Furthermore, Nuno developed the algorithm to downscale the national consumption profile to the natural load profile of each substation.

The solution enables the automatic use of real data to update the R&D Nester’s Digital Twin daily.

Throughout the internship, Nuno strengthened his skills in power system data analysis, wind and photovoltaic electricity generation prediction, as well as electricity demand forecasting, Python programming and application deployment, through an experience that combined power systems engineering and data analytics.

This work contributes to R&D Nester's capabilities in exploiting available data sources to update its Digital Twin of a large-scale electric grid with high share of renewables, towards offering the digital twin as a service to the community and, in particular, to the EnergyGuard Test and Experimentation Facility.