Second annual SESBC conference

Swedish Electric Storage and Balancing Centre (SESBC) held its second annual conference 24-25 October. The event took place in the picturesque university city Lund located in Sweden’s most southern region, Skåne. The conference had about 65 attendees from academia, industry and agencies within the field of electricity storage and balancing.

Olof Samuelsson, from Lund University, opened the conference together with director Massimo Bongiorno and co-director Anna Martinelli. SESBC’s three research layer leaders, Olof Samuelsson, Moyses Araujo and Tomas McKelvey gave a status reports for their respective areas, Systems, Materials and Devices for Energy Storage, and Intelligent Energy Management. Currently 22 projects have been granted for a total of 15 PhDs and 10 post-docs out of 3 calls.

The days involved two keynote speaches, research talks, corporate presentations, group discussions and a much-appreciated poster session.

"I, along with the rest of the management team, am so grateful for the successful annual conference! I’m pleased with the high quality of the presentations, the engagement in discussions, and the excellent collaboration during the preparations. SESBC is going strong!" Co-director Anna Martinelli

 

Company presentations by E.On, Port of Gothenburg and Liquid Wind

Three companies presented themselves this year. Rikard Andrén from E.On, Sweden’s biggest grid operator with 145 000 km grid and 1.6 million worldwide, could not stress enough the need for more people in the business. Victor Allgurén from Port of Gothenburg talked about how they work with electrification, hydrogen and estimations of future increased power demands.

Tomas Stenhede, senior technical adviser at Liquid Wind, followed up by giving a very informative talk on E-fuels for maritime applications, and how these can be used in global shipping. 

Keynotes by Christine Minke and Magnus Hindsberger

Keynote speeches were given by Christine Minke and Magnus Hindsberger, who were generous enough to answer a few questions about themselves.

Christine Minke is a process engineer by training and professor since 2022 at TU Clausthal, Germany. Her keynote was titled “Sustainability assessment of emerging technologies based on engineering science”, an area she has worked with since 2010. Ever since following her vision “to establish sustainability as a guiding principle in technology development”. Christine enjoys long walks and sports. Occasionally she likes to stand on her head just to see things from a new perspective.

“When it comes to sustainability assessments in power electronics, it’s vital to involve process and electronic engineers. We need people who know these product systems and have the skills to assess sustainability and circularity. These systems are so complex and from my experience you can’t do it top-down. Without a deep understanding of energy systems and power electronics, the results become meaningless,” says Christine Minke.

Magnus Hindsberger is operational forecasting manager at the Australian Energy Market Operator; a company he’s been working at since 2010 on various topics such as market modelling, scenario studies and in particular demand forecasting. Magnus also brings experience from similar roles in both New Zealand and Denmark, adding a valuable international perspective to his work in forecasting electricity demand and renewable generation. When he isn’t building computer models of energy systems he enjoys stacking LEGO bricks. Not just your regular police or fire station but his own designs, such as an epic award winning 100,000-piece model of the Harry Potter castle Hogwarts. Did we mention that Magnus is from Denmark?

“Balancing is going to be so important in the energy transition and we are seeing that battery storage could be one of the largest contributors. Batteries have grown from nothing six years ago to 1600 MW installed capacity of utility scale batteries installed in Australia’s National Electricity Market. To this comes another 1200 MW of distributed batteries at household and small businesses. We expect that these numbers will increase with about a factor of four the next five years. However, we are not locked into any specific technology and if something better comes along, we will definitely be open minded,” says Magnus Hindsberger.

International Scientific Advisory Board

Christine and Magnus also shared their thoughts on being members of SESBC’s international scientific advisory board.

“For me it is an honor to be in the advisory board, and it’s also very fun to contribute to discussions with all these colleagues from Sweden and all the other international universities. Sometimes you can feel a bit alone with your scientific vision, so to have this forum to share your thoughts with others that look in the same direction gives you a good feeling and the power to realize 100% renewable energy,” says Christine Minke. 

“With my background I see my role in the advisory board as a person that can illustrate life in the industry and the problems that keep us up at night. I want to direct researchers to the challenges that we are facing now and in the future. This way, we’re not just solving academic problems, but the problems that have big impacts in the real world,” says Magnus Hindsberger.

All members of the international scientific advisory board:

• Christine Roth, Professor at Universität Bayreuth
• Yaniv Gelbstein, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
• Eleonora Riva Sanseverino, Professor at University of Palermo
• Paolo Mattavelli, Professor at University of Padova
• Silvia Mucell, Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology
• Julia Matevosyan, Chief Engineer at The Energy Systems Integration Group
• Christine Minke, Professor TU Clausthal
• Tomas Hindsberger, Operational forecasting manager at the Australian Energy Market Operator

More images from the conference