I started this PhD because I wanted to help making our world sustainable. For some few, too-concerned people, this is an urgent priority, because every year we exceed several records in terms of global temperatures, ecosystem degradation and financial damage due to the climate crisis. Every year, humanity produces more emissions than the year before and every year, hundreds of thousands of people loose everything due to hurricanes, floods, water scarcity, hail, storms, heat waves, rising sea water, and much more.
Look at this year for example. It was both the hottest and driest ever recorded in my hometown. 40C and more for a week in the Alps… No rain in spring… More people died from heat than from car crashes in a single week.
And yet, every day, many people decide to play ignorant to the situation by actively making decisions that support exactly those systems, that have brought us to the situation we are in. What is on the line you might ask? Nothing more than the world we life in. Or in other words: your future.
In anycase, the topic of this PhD – namely empowering wind energy – is here to save the day. Greenhouse gases are the major driver of the climate crisis and the majority are commonly emitted by electricity and heat production plants (roughly 1/3). By switching to renewable energy sources we can break free from fossil fuels and build something sustainable. But for this to happen, wind energy must become highly competitive and efficient. And for that we need science and people who do it, which is where we come in (if you were wondering about the other 2/3 of the problem, better don’t. Also, it is an open question if we can reach the point before the climate crisis becomes truly and utterly disastrous)
TWEED, to its credit, is genuinely working towards that future. The research topics span the full wind energy chain, from turbine design and grid integration to long-term energy system planning. The programme actively bridges academic research and real industrial challenges, meaning the work is not just theoretically interesting but practically relevant. And the network itself, spanning universities and companies across Europe, is designed to produce researchers who can drive the transition, not just write about it.
That said, doing important work does not exempt us from also being part of the problem. Research, it turns out, can be surprisingly polluting, largely because it involves much flying (flying accounts for 3% of global emissions) and so I was wondering how we compare – mostly because we already had 4 training sessions and 1 conference already in the first year. Sos I did some math: considering all 12 students and 5 destinations, we traveled a distance of 160000 km, generating roughly 40t of CO2 emissions by plane. That is roughly what 6 EU citizens emit in an entire year, not even yet counting the traveled distance to our homes – usually far away from our stay. In other words, we consume 1.5 peoples lifes.
Luckily, some of us use public transport where possible, though that is, more or less, also where the effort ends. On the bright side, if successful our research results will mitigate this. Maybe. Somewhere in the far future.
I started this PhD because I wanted to help making our world sustainable.