I am Ivo, an (at the time of writing) 23-year-old Enschede resident. I was an Electrical Engineering student during my bachelor’s after which I did a Master in the field of Sustainable Energy Technology.
The Energy Transition is one of the great challenges of our time, and hence the choice to specialize in Sustainable Energy Technology came natural to me. This is where I feel I can best put the skills I obtained from Electrical Engineering to use.
The topic of smart distribution grids is the research area that sparked my interest the most out of the topics were discussed throughout the whole field of sustainable energy. Often overlooked, the grid is one of the key enablers of the energy transition. After publishing a paper in this field during my master’s titled GridShield: A Robust Fall-Back Control Mechanism for Congestion Management in Distribution Grids (2022), I felt the need to continue research work in the field of smart grids. My hope and my goal is that the research that I do is applicable and useful in the real world.
For me, pursuing a PhD position in the MegaMind program provides the perfect opportunity to do research in the Smart Grid field while maintaining a connection to the real world. All the partners that are involved can provide us as researchers with input regarding the problems they face in the here and now, thus providing us with the handles to do our research on topics that matter. Meanwhile, the collaboration with other universities makes MegaMind a strongly multidisciplinary project, where we can come up with solutions that work from all perspectives. MegaMind allows us as researchers to make a difference.
My specific research is titled “System performance versus privacy in energy management.” I will focus on how we can use the grid in a more efficient way, without unnecessarily sacrificing data privacy. Keeping the amount of data required for smart grid coordination as low as possible not only makes it easier to adapt legal frameworks to smart grids, but hopefully also increases the trust society has towards the idea of a smart grid.
I hope to contribute to the MegaMind project in a meaningful way in the upcoming years and look forward to learning all kinds of new insights regarding the energy transition from my colleagues. Ultimately, I hope that the MegaMind project we work on together accelerates the energy transition that we will go through in the next decades!
