Education
- PhD (1993) in Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India
- Mechanical Engineering (1988) in Electrical Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology Mesra, India
- Business and technology (1986) in Electrical Engineering, Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, India
Area of interest
Power systems
- Power system operation, economics and planning
- Electricity markets
- Ancillary services managament and pricing
- Distribution systems - operations, planning
- Renewable energy - economics, penetration into distribution systems
- Demand side management, demand response, smart loads and smart grids, electric vehicles in distribution systems
Energy systems
- Global energy models, scenario analysis, long-term planning
- Energy-environment linkages, sustainable development
Kankar Bhattacharya obtained his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in 1993. He was in the faculty of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai, India, during 1993-98. During his tenure at IGIDR Mumbai, he also held visiting faculty assignments at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria, to work on IIASA-World Energy Council Project on Long-term Energy Scenarios for South Asia.
In 1998 he joined the Department of Electric Power Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, at Gothenburg as the first holder of the Frederik Lamm Chair of Assistant Professor (1998-2001), was awarded the Docent (2001) and promoted to the rank of a tenured Associate Professor in 2002.
In January 2003, he joined the University of Waterloo in Canada as a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and was promoted to the rank of full Professor in July 2007.
Professor Bhattacharya’s research interests include power system operations, planning and economics- in a restructured power industry, penetration of renewable energy resources and their economics, planning and operational isses, demand side management and demand response, and various emerging problems in the smart grid environment. He has been extensively involved in Ph.D. supervision, industrial research projects, power-engineering curriculum development and education at under-graduate, graduate, Ph.D. levels as well as conducting external (industrial) courses.
Professor Bhattacharya received the Runner-up Award for Application of Operations Research to Development from International Federation of Operational Research Societies (1996), the Best Paper Award at the IEEE T and D Conference (2001), the Gunnar Engstrom Foundation Award from ABB Sweden (2001) for his research in power system economics. He is the author of the well received book- Operation of Restructured Power Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers (2001).
Professor Bhattacharya served as the one of the Editors of IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (2005-2011) and IEEE Power Engineering Letters (2005-2011). He serves as an Associate Director, Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Ebnergy (WISE).