A look back at the 4TU.Energy Community Day 2024

On 16 April 2024, our second annual Energy Community Day was a resounding success! Check out our after movie here and at the end of this article you will find a comprehensive overview of downloads of presentations, posters and sub-session summaries.

Held at the Meeting Centre Amersfoort, we welcomed more than 50 enthusiastic participants from the four technical universities in the Netherlands, all with different backgrounds in energy-related research. The full programme is available online. In addition to our review, Cursor, the independent news magazine of TU Eindhoven, wrote an article about our Community Day, read more here.

Our Scientific Director - Professor David Smeulders (TU/e) opened the day and warmly welcomed our guests who are actively contributing to our community.

The morning programme was filled with three research presentations that brought ICT and Energy Access together with Energy Research. It was such an exciting moment to show that our community has expanded not only in terms of members but also in terms of research topics. Thanks to Tarek Alskaif (WUR), Suzan Bayhan (UTwente) and Henny Romijn (TU/e).

In the afternoon, our funded projects were invited to give their pitches to the community. We were delighted to see the creative ideas and progress made by all these projects. Details of our funded projects can be found on the website here. For more information on our calls for proposals, please click here.

After the four pitches by Peyman Taheri (TUDelft), Maja Rücker (TU/e), Yali Tang (TU/e) and Navid Alinejadian (UTwente), we were inspired by Professor Kamel Hooman's (TUDelft) keynote on "High Temperature Heat" and then by Mark Boneschanscher's (TU/e) presentation on the overview of funding opportunities. The presentations were highly appreciated by the participants.

The three sub-sessions for further discussion and networking were highly appreciated by the participants. The sub-session on "Electricity and PV/Battery" was moderated by Pedro Vergara Barrios (TUDelft) and Elham (Eli) Shirazi (UTwente); the sub-session on "Decarbonisation of Heat" was moderated by Professor Mina Shahi (UTwente); and the sub-session on "Future Chemistry" was moderated by Maja Rücker (TU/e) and Akbar Asadi Tashvigh (WUR). The main conclusions of these sub-sessions were:

The energy transition is such a multidisciplinary challenge that only cooperation and networking can help us achieve our common goal.
4TU.Energy, as a central knowledge centre, could act as an intermediary in facilitating collaborations and connecting researchers, e.g. more peer-to-peer exchanges.
Co-creation with different stakeholders, especially industry, is essential to drive innovation and address real-world problems.

The day ended with a poster session and an award for the best poster. Congratulations to Jaimy Gebbeken, a PhD student at UTwente. His poster presented "High-temperature thermochemical heat storage system for industry".

Last but not least, we took the opportunity to thank our management team member - Professor Gerrit Brem - for his contribution to 4TU.Energy and wish him an energetic retirement!