Research Areas

Designing sustainable and renewable energy systems. Designing renewable energy systems means designing systems that can deal with and even thrive on the variability of solar and wind power. In a fully sector-coupled energy system where heat and transport are partially or fully electrified and synthetic fuels replace fossil ones, different strategies to balance renewable generation are available and come with their advantages and disadvantages: from continent-spanning electricity grids, to large-scale hydrogen storage, to demand response through heat electrification. All of this requires models that depict the necessary spatial and temporal resolution. Climate change is not the only urgent global problem. The design of truly sustainable energy systems also requires examining trade-offs between the energy transition and other issues, such as land use, material requirements, ecosystem impacts, and ramifications for society. As part of efforts in this area, we develop deeper integration of our models with those from other fields, such as industrial ecology.
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Talks
A selection of talks I gave:
- March 2023. Building renewable electricity systems: opportunities and challenges. Lecture for TU Delft / Erasmus University Rotterdam “Leading the Energy Transition” executive education program.
- September 2022. Can energy system models save the world? A cautionary tale. Public talk for the TU Delft PowerWeb Lecture series. A recording is available for download here.
- November 2021. Models: what are they good for anyway? TU Delft Power Rangers seminar.
- July 2021. PATHFNDR project: Calliope and Euro-Calliope. Public lunch lecture of the SWEET PATHFNDR project. Watch the recording on YouTube.
- April 2021. Decision support with energy system modelling. Public webinar for EPSRC Supergen Energy Networks Hub - Whole Energy Systems Webinar series. Watch the recording on YouTube.
- November 2020. Grüner Fussabdruck als Ziel (in German). ETH Zürich “Treffpunkt Science City” lecture series. Watch the recording.
- September 2020. Energieautarke Haushalte: Science Fiction oder Realität? (in German). Talk for the Swiss conference of cantonal energy offices “Konferenz Kantonaler Energiefachstellen”.
- November 2019. Zero energy emissions: The missing pieces of the puzzle. Sustainability Talks, University of Freiburg (Germany)
- July 2018. Reanalysis for wind and solar electricity simulations: challenges and lessons learned in the Renewables.ninja project. Keynote at the 1st International Symposium on Regional Reanalysis, Bonn (Germany).
- April 2018. High-performance computing (HPC) for the modelling of energy systems. Talk at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany).
- June 2017. Using reanalysis and satellite data to model solar and wind power: challenges, applications, and lessons learnt. ICEM 2017 Conference, Bari (Italy).
- March 2014. Contrasting different electricity futures by comparing a large number of optimized scenarios. IQ SCENE Workshop, UCL, London.