On 12 May 2014 The Recharge Magazine – one of the leading publications and news sources for the renewable energy industry globally – released a list of the world’s 40 leading young energy pioneers under the age of 40.
Recharge has placed Professor Pierre Pinson from the Center for Electric Power and Energy (CEE) at DTU Electrical Engineering on their 4040 list – the 40 leading young energy pioneers under the age of 40. The initiative aims a bringing together these young pioneers and forming a unique opportunity for them to engage with peers from diverse backgrounds and activities. The Recharge 4040 list is made up of individuals from areas such as renewables technology, finance, development and advocacy. People from major wind and solar companies, investment funds, banks, governments etc. are represented on the list, and from organizations such as Google, Vestas, NRG Energy and the US Department of Energy.
The 40 new-energy pioneers have been carefully selected by Recharge on the basis of thorough research and consultation with the industry, and the ambition is to form a powerful network of people who are making a difference in the development of a new sustainable energy model worldwide.
The work and projects of the 40 nominees will be highlighted over the coming months, and their profiles will be published in a special edition of the Recharge Magazine in July and on the Recharge4040 website. Activities over the coming months will lead up to a high-profile networking event on 2 October 2014.
Pierre Pinson is one of youngest Professors at the Technical University of Denmark, also heading the Energy Analytics & Markets group, part of the Centre for Electric Power and Energy (CEE) at the Department of Electrical Engineering. Prior to moving to Denmark, he got his education in France, where he earned a M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics for the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA Toulouse) and a Ph.D. in Energetics from Ecole des Mines de Paris (now known as Mines ParisTech).
The core focus of his research and teaching is on easing the large scale integration of renewable energy generation based on a multidisciplinary approach combining mathematics, statistics, meteorology, power system engineering and decision sciences. His broad methodological, applied and broad-audience contributions have made him a leading player in the field of renewable energy analytics. He also enjoys side activities like co-organizing the Global Energy Forecasting competition (first edition in 2012 and second one in 2014), the largest web-based competition of its kind, featured by Yahoo Finance and CNBC among others.
Using his applied mathematics background, he has contributed to developing novel mathematical frameworks permitting to predict renewable energy generation at various temporal and spatial scales (for instance, for the next few minutes at a large offshore wind farm, or for the next 10 days over the whole Europe) and to optimally embed these forecasts in decision processes. The originality and strength of his approach is that this is done in a fully probabilistic framework, therefore accepting the variability and limited predictability of renewable energy generation, while aiming to reveal the true cost of such uncertainty for society. Currently, for instance, he is aiming to propose new approaches to electricity market design, where one would trade random variables (for uncertain energy supply and demand) instead of the more classical block and curve offers. That initiative is sponsored by the Danish Strategic Council for Strategic Research under the “5s – Future Electricity Markets” project.
On the way to further developing this grand project, he has been a guest researcher at the University of Oxford, Mathematical Institute, and at the University of Washington (Seattle), Department of Statistics. In addition, he had a one-year stay as a scientist at the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF, located in Reading, UK), the world-leading organization in global weather forecasting research and operational services.