The engineers from the Higher Technical School of Engineering of the University of Seville (ETSI), Salvador Fuentes and Francisco Ramos, have received the Cátedra Endesa award that recognizes the research work of higher degree university students. The general director of Endesa in Andalusia and Extremadura, Rafael Sánchez Durán, and the director of Endesa Networks in Andalusia and Extremadura, Emilio Jiménez, have presented the awards of this 18th edition of the awards at the Higher Technical School of Engineering of Seville. Endesa Chair Awards, whose endowment is 1,000 euros per category, in order to continue supporting future Andalusian engineers.

Among the criteria that have been taken into account when selecting the winners are mainly the originality of the proposals, their vision of the future and their evolution and the application of new technologies to the infrastructure of the electrical network. “At Endesa it is our desire to continue supporting future generations of engineers and these awards that we have been awarding for 18 years are an example of this. We have received projects with a high academic quality, a sign of the high value of the generations of engineers who are yet to come,” Rafael Sánchez Durán highlighted during the awards ceremony.

On behalf of the Higher Technical School of Engineering of Seville, its director, Francisco Rodríguez Rubio, attended, who highlighted the importance of the collaboration between Endesa and the School "with this being able to carry out one of the University's missions, which is the transfer of knowledge. The fruitful relationship that exists is noteworthy and the contribution that the chair makes by sponsoring events, scholarships, collaborations, doctoral theses, etc. is appreciated.”

From among the more than 600 projects presented, the jury of experts selected 16 finalists (10 from the end of the Bachelor's degree plus 6 from the end of the Master's degree), with the winners being the engineers Salvador Fuentes and Francisco Ramos.

The aeronautical engineer Salvador Fuentes, born in Córdoba, has been the winner in the Final Master's category for his work Analysis of the technical, economic and environmental feasibility of a new electrical system for the autonomous city of Ceuta. His work has been recognized with this distinction for proposing a new electrical system in an isolated environment dependent on fossil fuels, such as Ceuta. In his proposal he proposes moving towards models that guarantee security of supply and the integration of renewable energies, evolving towards a new, more efficient and sustainable energy model, to face the challenges posed in the so-called energy trilemma.

On the other hand, Francisco Ramos, with a degree in Industrial Technologies engineering and originally from El Puerto de Santa María, has won with his Final Degree Project Prediction of demand and renewable generation with Deep Learning: application to the optimization of electric vehicle charging stations. In his project he offers solutions to face the future paradigm of the electrical system after the massive introduction of electric vehicles, whose key challenge is the support that the network infrastructure will have to give to the implementation of electric vehicle charging stations at big scale. The proposal involves the use of intelligent planning algorithms, based on data and machine learning techniques, to learn the behavior of electric vehicle charging and photovoltaic generation.

The creation of the Endesa Red Chair Award took place in 2004 after the agreements reached between the Company and the University of Seville to grant the award, establish a framework for scientific and technical collaboration and promote the Hispalense doctoral program called “Systems of electrical energy.”