From Energy Systems to Energy Justice

This summer school was held in 2022.

Key Details:

Target group: early-stage PhD students and MSc students.

Location: This summer school was held in Sundvolden, Norway.

Motivation and Description:

After several years of looking at inter-disciplinary technical aspects, this summer school broadened its inter-disciplinary fields to include speakers and students from the social sciences and justice areas together with technical speakers. Areas of policy and regulations have become bottlenecks in the energy network's transformation to renewable energy sources. They along with accessible and deployable technical solutions are also key to providing fair and just access to all. The invited speakers came from Europe and North America; with a good mix of academic and industry, as well as a hands-on tutorial by one of the authors behind the UnitCommitment.jl library.

This year we had 42 students attend from: the University of Oslo (Norway), University of Stavanger (Norway), Technical University of Berlin (Germany), Technical University of Munich (Germany), University of Lille (France), Technical University Delft (Netherlands), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), RWTH Aachen University (Germany), University of Groningen (Netherlands), National Institute of Science Education and Research (Bhubaneswar, India), RK University (Rajkot, Gujrat, India), and University of Sfax (Tunisia). We also had guests from Kenya, who were visiting the University of Stavanger.
An overview of the courses that were held during the summer school. The courses are colour coordinated; the colour olive for industry-related topics, blue for technical topics, purple for social/justice topics, and red for policy topics. In the illustration, you can also see that some courses are a blend of different categories.

The networking aspect

Building partnerships and collaborations are vital aspects of the LUCS and PACE INTPART projects. This type of networking is challenging in virtual streamed or hybrid environments. That is why it was very important for this year’s summer school to be in-person only; especially professor Frank Eliassen, the local organizer from the University of Oslo, worked hard to make this happen.

The "One Minute Madness" session was a great hit this year, where the students had one minute and one slide to present their work. During the coffee break afterward, it was great to see everyone talking about each other’s work and discussing collaboration possibilities.

About the funding projects

LUCS (Learning to Understand and Control nation-wide Smart grids of energy prosumers) is a collaborative project between SimulaMet, University of Oslo, the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of TU Berlin, and the German Turkish Advanced Research Centre for ICT Berlin. The project is funded by INTPART and aims to provide knowledge and experience that will assist masters and early doctoral students with experiment design and performance analyses of smart grid systems.

PACE (Partnership for joint Curriculum Development and Research in Energy Informatics) is a collaborative project between research groups at University of Stavanger, University of Oslo, Technical University of Munich, and University of Lille. The project is funded by INTPART and aims to strengthen the research and educational activity on energy informatics at the partner institutions.

Course organisers:

The Summer School is organised by several European universities and research institutions through the LUCS and PACE INTPART projects. The partners are:

University of Lille, France
Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering, Norway
University of Oslo, Norway
University of Stavanger, Norway
Technical University of Berlin, Germany,
GT-ARC, Germany
Technical University of Munich, Germany