Projects
Below is an overview of funding-awarded or co-funded projects to which I contribute(d). Together with the research areas, they provide an overview of the main recent and ongoing activities as a basis for potential ideas for collaboration.
Running
Greenhouse horticulture provides 10% of the firm power capacity that balances the Dutch the grid thanks to its combined heat-and-power (CHP) plants. However, the energy transition requires shifting from fossil CHPs to sources like geothermal and solar, turning horticulture from a flexible net electricity producer into an inflexible net electricity consumer.
Multi-Carrier Energy Hubs (MC-EHs), where many technologies and carriers integrate smartly, are a promising alternative. In SPROUT, we will design MC-EHs that benefit not only local greenhouse needs but also act as system buffers that support large-scale renewable integration and mitigate grid congestion. We do this together with the University of Leiden, Wageningen Research and University, as well as industrial partners Division Q, eFuelution, Resourcefully and Westland Infra. The project is funded by RVO via the MOOI funding.
'Modelling to Generate Alternatives' (MGA) is an increasingly popular method to provide more insightful and robust energy system planning. However, the latest advancements of MGA have often been embedded in specific modelling software, limiting reuse.
The project aims to streamline MGA's use. First, by developing a plug-and-play MGA Python package that can be coupled with many widespread software. Second, by providing an interactive dashboard to explore MGA outputs regardless of their origin and discover powerful insights. The project is partly funded by the TU Delf Climate Action Programme.
RAMP is an open-source software suite for the stochastic simulation of any user-driven energy demand time series based on few simple inputs. The project aims to provide synthetic data wherever metered data does not exist, such as when designing systems in newly-built or remote urban areas or when looking at future electric-vehicle fleets.
Born as a small self-managed project, RAMP is now a joint software development effort co-funded by many institutions: Reiner Lemoine Institut, VITO, University of Liège and Universidad Mayor de San Simón.
Concluded
In the SEEDS project, we built a co-creative, multi-model workflow that integrates human preferences into the generation of carbon-neutral energy system design options while accurately modelling the relevant technical, economic and environmental constraints. The cornerstone of the modelling workflow was a novel, human-in-the-loop version of MGA.
We did this in a consortium of four institutions for the case of Portugal, together with a broad range of stakeholders ranging from citizen associations to energy cooperatives, system operators and policymakers. The project was funded by CHIST-ERA.
Wind power still faces low success in Switzerland, suffering from lower productivity than in neighbouring countries and local resistance. This project, funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, aimed to identify hundreds of different technically and economically feasible spatial configurations for Swiss wind deployment, generated via MGA.
We quantified the trade-offs between alternative ways of distributing wind power across the country regarding social acceptability, grid stability benefits, and resilience across different weather conditions. The results clarified the possible role of wind power in a rapidly decarbonising Switzerland, with direct relevance to policy and planning.
JustWind4All aimed to support the acceleration of on- and offshore wind energy, including emerging wind technologies like airborne and floating, by using a trans-disciplinary multi-method research design. It combined socio-environmental impact assessment, techno-economic modelling, multi-scale approximate computing, participatory processes, living labs and more to support decision-making, focusing on energy justice and social innovation. The project was funded by the EU's Horizon programme.