Newsletter – Energy Transition

Newsletter 2024:1 from the Energy Transition Profile Area

Olof Samuelsson, profile area coordinator, reviews events from the spring and looks ahead to autumn activities.

After a summer filled with well-deserved rest, we are now back and looking forward to the many exciting activities and collaborations of the autumn. Autumn marks a new beginning for us, with several important initiatives and events on the agenda. We have a series of lunch seminars planned, exciting research underway and opportunities to create new collaborations within and beyond Lund University.

I would like to start this first newsletter by telling you that we have strengthened the profile area with communications officer Cecilia Schubert. Cecilia Schubert will be supporting the profile area and Compel in various communication initiatives. One example is that she has started and is responsible for our LinkedIn page. I encourage you to follow and interact with it to help disseminate our research and activities to a wider audience. Cecilia Schubert has also been working on information for our members which has resulted in our newsletter, which will be published on a regular basis.

The work of the spring has laid a strong foundation for the progress of the autumn. In January, we gathered at Mossbylund, which allowed us to see the big picture of our work and enabled our progress in the spring. One of the most important outcomes of the meeting was the start of our doctoral network. Here, I would like to thank Gabriel Malmer, who is holding the threads of the network together with some other PhD students.

We have worked intensively during the spring to integrate Compel into the profile area, and it is finally starting to fall into place. Compel@LU is also moving forward with a newly launched website. The group is also taking shape, and at the end of August we held a kick-off meeting for Compel at LU, which provided an opportunity for participants to get to know each other and focus on more collaborations. In early September, some of the group participated in a national Compel event in Uppsala together with our partners at Chalmers University of Technology and Uppsala University. We are also looking forward to Lund University's Future Days on 16-17 October, where Compel project coordinator Elna Heimdal Nilsson will speak about battery safety in the cities of the future - a topic that is becoming increasingly important as electrification increases. I hope you will come and see her on stage. More information to come!

At the same time as the government announced Compel last autumn with extra research funding for battery research and electrification, a corresponding investment was made in education. Under the heading of Sweden as a country of engineers, Lund University, mainly LTH, Uppsala University and Chalmers University of Technology, has received increased funding to train more civil engineers, which we are very proud of. The energy transition has had education as part of its mission from the start, and we have already worked actively to increase the number of civil engineers in the energy field. The profile area commissioned programme planner Åsa Vestergren to assemble a working group consisting of the programme management teams that have selected which civil engineering programmes will receive more places in this semester's intake.

In August, representatives from our focus area ‘Energy storage and sector coupling’ concluded a project together with Trelleborg Municipality and Lund University Commissioned Education (LUCE) called ‘Kompetensfonden Trelleborg - fokus vätgas’. The project ended with an event consisting of representatives from the Swedish Energy Agency, as well as the energy companies Trelleborgs Energi AB, Öresundskraft and Kraftringen. Our researchers presented the results of two thesis projects, which showed how important the battery component is in the hydrogen production system.

This autumn we are looking forward to several important activities. We have four lunch seminars planned, with our first one already held here in September focusing on AdTherM, a competence centre in thermal processes. Don't forget to book the upcoming seminars on 18 October, 15 November and 13 December. On 18 October we will welcome Patrick Lauenburg from E.ON to the stage, which we are looking forward to.

In addition, the Steering Group had its kick-off meeting in August, where we identified the key areas to focus on and the activities needed to increase our presence and visibility and put the Energy Transition on the map.

Thank you for your engagement! I look forward to an eventful autumn where we all actively work towards a sustainable and fossil-free future. See you at upcoming meetings, seminars and events!

Olof Samuelsson, coordinator of the Energy Transition profile area