Guest Speakers

Manu Ravishankar, Innovation Lead - Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund, Innovate UK

Manu Ravishankar has over a decade of experience in developing and supporting energy system innovation for decarbonisation. He has focussed on developing whole systems approaches to aiding sustainable transitions in areas including renewable integration, system flexibility and hydrogen. He is currently an Innovation Lead for the £450m Strategic Innovation Fund delivered by Innovate UK and Ofgem which is taking a radical approach to enabling UK’s future energy system. Prior to Innovate UK, he worked at the Carbon Trust providing strategic innovation support to the UK and international governments, large utilities and emerging Climate Tech companies. He has authored landmark reports on topics such as whole energy system flexibility, net zero in the cooling sector, local energy systems and novel technologies such as thermal energy storage.

Rebecca Rosling, Head of Smart Customers R&D, EDF Energy

Rebecca is the Head of Smart Customers R&D at EDF Energy. She leads a team of research engineers innovating to EDF’s purpose of helping the UK achieve Net Zero, with focus areas including Heat, Decarbonisation of Mobility, Storage & Flexibility, and Hydrogen. Rebecca was previously the Head of Energy Market and Credit Risk and the Head of Portfolio Management at EDF Energy.

Alec Waterhouse, Head of Modelling, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Alec is Head of the Central Modelling Team in the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. His team are responsible for working out how much green-house gas the United Kingdom are projected to emit and developing a range of models that make these projections, taking into account the effect of government policies and a host of other factors. The team also work on models that help to understand how we can meet our long-term emissions targets and how government energy policies affect consumers. They have designed and built a bespoke policy simulation language for household energy modelling.

IDLES Programme Speakers

Prof. Tim Green, Professor of Power Engineering, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Tim is the Principal Investigator of the IDLES Programme. His research focuses on the analysis and technology to develop a zero-carbon electricity supply system that can accommodate variable renewable sources and new widespread electric vehicle charging while still delivering a cost effective and very reliable service. Tim’s research has been supported by EPSRC, Hitachi Energy, National Grid ESO and UK Power Networks.

Dr Iain Staffell, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Energy, Centre for Environmental Policy

Iain is co-developer of the Renewables.ninja, an open web platform that lets you simulate the hourly power output from wind and solar power plants located anywhere in the world. Iain also leads the Electric Insights project, an interactive website and quarterly report on the supply, demand, price and environmental impacts of Britain's electricity. Iain's research centres on decarbonising electricity systems, ranging from the economics of battery storage and productivity of offshore wind farms to efficient ways of integrating renewables into electricity markets.

Dr Aruna Sivakumar, Reader in Consumer Demand Modelling and Urban Systems, Centre for Transport Studies

Aruna is the Director of the Urban Systems Lab and leads several smart city and systems modelling initiatives including, for example, the monitoring and evaluation work package of the EU Sharing Cities project and accessibility framework for equity analysis in the Wellcome Trust-funded Pathways project. Her research on activity-based microsimulation models of urban resource demands is internationally renowned and she has been invited to present at several seminar series, such as the UCL Energy series and the Choice Modelling Seminar series at Leeds University.

Dr Jacek Pawlak, Research Fellow, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Jacek is a Research Fellow in in the Urban Systems Laboratory and Centre for Transport Studies and works in the fields of transport, urban systems, technology, and innovation. His background is in Economics, Geography and Transport Studies. In recent years, Jacek has been involved in research concerning understanding and modelling the role and impact of new technologies on transport and more broadly urban systems, using traditional and emerging data sources.

Prof. Nilay Shah, Professor of Process Systems Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering

Nilay is the Head of the Chemical Engineering Department. His research interests include design and analysis of energy systems; supply chain design and optimisation; process synthesis and development for fine chemicals, pharmaceutical and biochemical processes; and safety in design and operation, especially the application of formal mathematical techniques to assess and improve process safety.

Maria Yliruka, Research Postgraduate, Department of Chemical Engineering

Maria is a Research Postgraduate in the Chemical Engineering Department, supervised by Prof. Nilay Shah. Her PhD project aims at developing a multi-vector model of Great Britain's national energy system using a Resource-Technology Network (RTN) modelling framework. Multiple energy carriers will be included.

Prof. Christos Markides, Professor of Clean Energy Technologies, Department of Chemical Engineering

Christos leads the Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory, coordinates the Experimental Multiphase Flow (EMF) Laboratory, which is the largest such experimental space at Imperial College London, and is a Co-Founder and Director of recent spin-out company Solar Flow. His research interests include methods, processes, components, technologies and systems for the collection, recovery, utilization, conversion and/or storage of energy for heating, cooling and power, novel 'total energy' integration schemes in high-efficiency systems with emphasis on renewable and waste heat, and solar energy; and transport processes, heat and fluid flows in energy technologies, urban environments, physiological systems, etc., including turbulent, inhomogeneous, multiphase and reacting flows.

Andreas Olympios, Research Postgraduate, Clean Energy Processes Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering

Andreas is a Research Postgraduate in the Chemical Engineering Department, supervised by Prof. Christos Markides. His research interests include the design and operational optimisation of low-carbon heating technologies, the identification of energy-system implications of heat and electricity decarbonisation; and modelling of large-scale thermo-mechanical (e.g., pumped-thermal) electricity storage technologies.

Dr Mirabelle Muûls, Assistant Professor in Economics, Imperial College Business School

Mirabelle is the programme director of the MSc in Climate Change, Management and Finance. Her current research focuses on the economics of climate change, seeking in particular to understand the impact of climate change policies and climate change on firms' emissions, energy efficiency, innovation, competitiveness and performance. Her research interests also cover international trade and globalisation.

Dr Shefali Khanna, Research Associate in Energy and Environmental Economics, Imperial College Business School

Shefali's research interests lie in energy and environmental economics and policy. Her current research focuses on understanding the drivers of energy demand in the residential and industrial sectors and on evaluating the design and impact of climate policies. She earned a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University, where she was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and a Ph.D. Student Affiliate of Evidence for Policy Design at the Centre for International Development.

Prof. Goran Strbac, Professor of Energy Systems, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Goran has extensive experience in advanced modelling and analysis of operation, planning, security and economics of energy systems. He led the development of novel advanced analysis approaches and methodologies that have been extensively used to inform industry, governments and regulatory bodies about the role and value of emerging new technologies and systems in supporting cost effective evolution to smart low carbon energy future. His research areas include whole-energy system modelling, energy market design, integration of renewable energy sources, distributed energy resources, security and resilience of future energy infrastructure and energy planning under uncertainties.

Cormac O'Malley, Research Postgraduate, Control and Power Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Cormac is co-supervised by Prof. Goran Strbac, Dr Fei Teng, Dr Marko Aunedi and Dr Luis Badesa. His research focuses on optimising the operation of future low-carbon power systems. Operational methods can be used to increase efficiency or as part of resource adequacy assessment. His core modelling capabilities lie in formulating real world energy problems in maths, to then be solved either by convex optimisation or re-enforcement learning. In particular, optimisation under uncertainty, including renewable forecast uncertainty, generator outage probability and aggregated EV connection uncertainty.