Vahid Vahidinasab

Contact Details

Maxwell Building, Salford Business School, University of Salford, M5 4WT, Manchester, UK

V.Vahidinasab@salford.ac.uk

Current positions

Professor

Biography

Vahid Vahidinasab is Professor and Chair in Sustainability at Salford Business School, University of Salford, and Academic Research Lead of the Centre for Sustainable Innovation (CSI). He studies how local energy systems can run on clean power while staying affordable, fair and resilient for the people who depend on them. His work covers smart grids and microgrids, electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging, and local flexibility and peer-to-peer energy markets. It also takes in whole energy systems that link electricity, gas, heat, hydrogen and transport.

He is Principal Investigator at Salford on DriVe2X, a €10.5m Horizon Europe and UKRI programme on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies. He leads a work package and the project's UK pilot on the Isle of Wight, where bidirectional chargers are installed at three host sites. In April 2026 he chaired the UK-EU Innovation and Collaboration Symposium on V2X and Smart Charging, which he co-organised with Innovate UK and the EU V2X Cluster.

He has held senior roles in UK and EU research programmes worth more than £70m, including the EPSRC National Centre for Energy Systems Integration, the EPSRC Active Building Centre Research Programme and the EU H2020 inteGRIDy project at Newcastle University. Before joining Salford he was Lead of the Sustainable Power and Energy Systems Research Group at Nottingham Trent University, where he also founded NTU-GridLab. He has published more than 200 works, seven of them books, and has been cited more than 5,000 times. Stanford University and Elsevier placed him in the top 2% of scientists worldwide in 2021-2025.

Earlier, on secondment from SBU, he was Vice-President for Management and Resources Development at Niroo Research Institute, the national electric power research institute. He designed a national research funding scheme to support purposeful, targeted research and innovation in the power industry.

He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications and IEEE Power Engineering Letters, and Subject Editor for microgrids at IET Smart Grid and IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution. From 2022 to 2025 he was Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Smart Grids and Sustainable Energy. In the IEEE Power & Energy Society he co-chairs the Chapter Awards and sits on the Long Range Planning Committee. He is a Full Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Member of the IET and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

He also writes for general readers, including a 2025 article in The Conversation on two-way electric vehicle charging. He welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students and from partners in industry, government and local communities.

Areas of Research

Smart homes, buildings, microgrids and grids: operation, control and planning of active buildings, microgrids and distribution networks, including their resilience to extreme events.

Flexibility in local energy communities: electric vehicles, smart charging and vehicle-to-grid (V2G and V2X), battery storage and its degradation, local flexibility markets and peer-to-peer energy trading.

People and communities in the net zero transition: fair market design, demand-side participation, and business models that let households and communities share the value of flexibility.

Methods: optimisation under uncertainty, AI and machine learning for forecasting and decision-making, and whole energy system modelling across electricity, gas, heat, hydrogen and transport.

Areas of Supervision

Vehicle-to-grid and smart charging for local flexibility; fair design of local energy and flexibility markets; resilience of local energy communities and distribution networks; AI forecasting and optimisation for grid-edge energy systems; hydrogen, storage and sector coupling in whole energy systems; smart buildings and campuses as flexible energy assets; second-life batteries and the circular use of energy assets; business models and policy for community energy

Teaching Qualifications and Recognitions Publications

Teaching

Vahid has taught power and energy systems for more than 15 years at undergraduate and postgraduate level, as programme leader, module leader, personal tutor and supervisor. He has led 10 modules, with an average student evaluation above 4.2 out of 5, and designed five new modules: three postgraduate modules on sustainable energy at Shahid Beheshti University and two research-led modules on sustainable power and energy at Nottingham Trent University. He has supervised more than 80 theses and projects, 14 of them at PhD level, and has been an external examiner at a number of universities in the UK and the EU, including TU Delft, the University of Sheffield, the University of Leeds, Cardiff University and Aston University, and internationally.

His teaching is research-led and problem-based. Students work on project-based tasks, join field and virtual site visits, and answer live polls and short quizzes in class. From 2012 to 2014 he was Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education at the Power and Water University of Technology in Tehran, now part of Shahid Beheshti University. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Qualifications and Recognitions

Qualifications

Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology
2006 - 2010
Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology
2004 - 2006
Electrical Engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology
2000 - 2004

Recognitions

Stanford University and Elsevier Top 2% of World Scientists
Associate Editor and Editorial Board Member, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
IEEE PES Chapter Outstanding Engineer Award
Chair and co-organiser, UK-EU Innovation and Collaboration Symposium on V2X and Smart Charging, with Innovate UK and the EU V2X Cluster

Publications

View all Publications

Prof Vahid Vahidinasab