What NEON published

Solar panels, heat pumps and electric cars add new loads and peaks to Dutch neighbourhood grids. This thesis maps which technology causes overloading, voltage or unbalance problems in which grid type and season, and then shows that coordinated control of the same devices and batteries can relieve congestion while lowering costs. Grid operators can use it to weigh flexibility as an alternative or complement to reinforcing cables and transformers.

Many Dutch EV drivers rely on a few public chargers in their street, and a car left plugged in after charging blocks the next user. The thesis finds that moving the car after charging does most to raise successful sessions, and that requests and availability notices add to it as cars per charger rise. Municipalities and charge point operators can help by enabling neighbours to communicate and make agreements.

Shipping causes almost 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and electric ships need efficient onboard grids. Bipolar DC grids offer two voltage levels and a backup path, but uneven loads shift the neutral voltage; this thesis provides compact, low-loss balancing converters and control schemes that correct that shift. Ship builders and marine power-system designers can use its designs and placement rules.

New wind technologies need local acceptance before they can scale. This thesis finds that residents judge airborne wind energy mainly on perceived local impacts, such as sound, landscape and aviation lights, and on whether developers act fairly and transparently; economic benefits and general attitudes to the energy transition mattered little. Developers and permitting authorities can use this to focus design and engagement.

Most activity-based travel models predict a single average day, which hides how people spread shopping and leisure over the week. This thesis adds multi-day activity models estimated on Dutch GPS data, showing for example that harsh weather shifts activity timing, and mode-choice models for multimodal trips in which distance to public transport matters. Modellers can use them for climate and urban policy questions.

The EU promises a transition that leaves no one behind, but binding energy law gives that promise little legal shape. Taking network tariffs as its main case, the thesis shows how the division of powers between the EU, member states and national regulators decides how affordability and sustainability are weighed and how transition costs are shared. It informs legislators and regulators setting tariff rules and regulatory mandates.

Electric cars still cost more to buy than petrol cars, and the emissions from producing them, especially their batteries, can undercut climate gains. The thesis shows that sharing standard motor and battery modules across a vehicle family lowers total cost of ownership, and that cleaner electricity and larger production volumes cut battery manufacturing emissions. Carmakers and life-cycle analysts can use the methods to weigh cost, efficiency and production emissions together.

Fast-charging stations add large loads to medium-voltage grids that are already congested in places. This thesis gives grid operators faster ways to check whether new chargers fit, in power and in harmonic distortion, and to share the available capacity among several connections instead of giving each a fixed limit. Its case studies use real 10.5 kV Dutch grids.

High purchase prices and range anxiety still slow the uptake of battery-electric vehicles, and the number of possible powertrain configurations is vast. The thesis gives fast optimisation tools for sizing batteries, motors and transmissions and operating them efficiently. The race car is one test case; the same methods are applied to fuel-saving control of a hybrid truck and to motor sizing for road vehicles.

Heavy electric trucks need megawatt chargers, and feeding them straight from the 10 kV grid avoids a separate low-voltage transformer. This thesis tackles three practical obstacles in such chargers: switching losses, the size of the isolation transformer, and DC bias that can saturate its core. The results, validated on scaled prototypes, inform charger makers aiming for smaller and more efficient units.

Airborne wind energy has to show at what size and cost it can compete before investors and system planners count on it. The thesis gives a consistent, open way to size kite systems for lowest cost of energy or highest market value; its scaling study puts the cost-optimal size between 100 and 1000 kW, with kite mass, energy storage and tether replacement as main cost drivers.

Driverless vehicles can only run without a human backup if they cope with situations their software misjudges. The thesis shows that combining different driving systems and switching between them keeps vehicles safe and available, and adds tools to choose sensors early in design and to detect 86.8% of hazardous scenarios in operation. The link to the energy transition is indirect: shared automated electric fleets depend on such safety.

Self-driving electric taxis could make point-to-point travel more sustainable than private cars, but only if vehicles and fleet are designed for how they will be used. The thesis shows that ride-pooling lowers congestion and travel time in New York City, that 20 kWh batteries give the best trade-off there, and that vehicle-to-grid can backfire if battery wear is ignored.

Policymakers must plan for a mobility system that is electrifying and may become shared and automated, with growing effects on the power grid. The thesis shows that agent-based models built on observed travel patterns turn such futures into quantified scenarios that non-modellers can discuss and adjust, finding for instance that shared autonomous vehicles could shrink the fleet by 80-90% and that most evening charging can be shifted.

Modular multilevel converters can connect fast chargers directly to the medium-voltage grid, but their many modules make them hard to control well with standard loops. This thesis gives control designs that handle limits, predict further ahead and balance modules in a distributed way, supporting efficient and reliable operation of such chargers. The work is control engineering, tested in simulation and on lab-scale converters.

Fast chargers usually need a bulky line-frequency transformer between the medium-voltage grid and the vehicle. This thesis shows a route to remove it by converting medium-voltage AC to a medium-frequency link in one stage, reducing the cost and volume of charging stations. Charger makers can use its design rules, such as capacitor sizing and the case for square-wave operation.

Investment in climate mitigation still falls short of the Paris goals while money keeps flowing to fossil assets. This work maps feedback loops in the Dutch financial sector, such as learning and lock-in, that can speed up the shift, but finds they need coordinated short-term action on top. Supervisors, policymakers, asset owners and educators get seventeen concrete interventions to choose from.

Batteries in local grids can earn money from price differences, but in this study that alone did not cover their cost. Combined with flexible loads and sales of frequency reserves they became profitable, while direct load control for congestion kept success rates above 90%. Commercial sites with little flexibility of their own gain most from adding a battery.

Hydrogen fuel-cell trucks need control software that splits power between fuel cell and battery so the stack lasts and fuel use stays low. The benchmark shows that six different strategies each left parts of this problem unsolved. Its open-source simulation platform gives truck makers and control researchers a shared test bed for new strategies.

Camera-based perception for automated driving relies on transformer detectors, and one of their core operators uses only a small fraction of GPU bandwidth. This work finds the causes and delivers kernels that are 2.4 to 14 times faster with identical outputs, tested on data-centre GPUs. The link to the energy transition is indirect: efficient perception is one requirement for automated, shared electric mobility.

Airborne wind energy with soft kites needs simulation tools that predict lift and drag well enough to design larger, more efficient wings. This study provides measured flow fields around a kite wing to check such tools: lift trends from fast and detailed models agree with the measurements, while drag near the wing tip remains poorly captured. Model developers can use the published data for validation.

Fast chargers connected directly to the medium-voltage grid can be built around a direct AC/AC modular multilevel converter, but its many interacting currents are hard to control safely. This controller comes with stability guarantees and respects operating limits by design, which supports reliable operation of such chargers. It is a control-engineering step, validated on a lab-scale prototype rather than a full charger.

Public charging points serve several drivers and work only if each one frees the spot in time. This study shows that drivers mainly expect each other to move a charged car, while norms on contacting others and limiting charging are weaker. The authors advise municipalities and charge point operators to stress the shared nature of charging in their messages, make contact between users easier, and avoid communicating about ambiguous behaviour.

Perovskite solar cells are a candidate for thin, efficient solar layers on buildings and for tandems with silicon, provided their contact layers can be made by scalable processes without losing efficiency. This work shows that in nickel-oxide contacts made by atomic layer deposition, surface Ni3+ states cause the losses, and that reducing them with hydrogen plasma lifts cell efficiency from about 2% to 15%.

Electric vehicles depend on chargers, software and grid connections from many firms working together, and how that interoperability arises shapes competition. The study finds that open standards give the broadest competition and adoption in the long run, but often need a dominant player or regulation to secure complementary assets; vertical integration can carry a market through its start. This informs regulators deciding whether and when to intervene in such markets.

A kite power plant must choose a flight path that trades energy yield against land use, grid-friendly output and wear. For a 3 MW-class reference kite, circular paths deliver the most power per square kilometre, while figure-of-eight paths lower power peaks (peak-to-average ratio 3.85) and fatigue loading. Developers can use the comparison, and the open model behind it, when selecting paths and controllers.

Keeping grid frequency stable needs fast reserves, which homes and businesses could supply with their batteries, cars and heat pumps. This study shows that doing so can turn energy costs into net income, and that mixed residential-commercial nodes with home and public chargers offer 5 times the reserve potential of residential nodes and 12 times that of commercial ones. That indicates where distributed reserves are most worth recruiting.

Households and businesses with solar panels, electric cars and heat pumps can lower their bills by shifting when they use and store power, but battery wear eats into the gains. In this study vehicle-to-grid was used more in larger grids and less at commercial sites, and battery wear mattered little in small grids but strongly reduced battery and vehicle-to-grid use in larger ones.

New energy technologies can stall when neighbours object, and airborne wind energy is still early enough to adapt its design and siting. This study finds that acceptance depends on what residents notice locally and on whether the developer acts openly and fairly, not on their general view of the energy transition. The authors see a need for regulation specific to airborne wind energy and socially responsible planning.

As more residents drive electric, several neighbours depend on the same public charger, and an occupied spot means someone cannot charge. This survey finds a gap between intention and practice: many drivers want agreements about contact and about moving charged cars, but hardly any make them. The authors recommend that municipalities and charging point operators inform, encourage and help residents to make such agreements.

Ride-hailing and other on-demand fleets only replace private car trips if they serve requests reliably, also at peak hours when demand is uncertain. This dispatch method anticipates where vehicles and demand will accumulate and raises the share of requests served in simulations. Ride-hailing operators could use it to serve more trips with the same fleet.

City logistics can use larger vehicles as moving transfer points for smaller last-mile vehicles, but those hand-overs only work if both arrive on time. The study shows that plans ignoring travel-time uncertainty badly underestimate late arrivals, and that planning for uncertainty cuts expected failure costs by about 96%. Parcel and freight operators can use this to make synchronised last-mile delivery reliable.

Financial flows remain out of line with the Paris Agreement even as ESG and impact investing grow. This study shows that reasoning which justifies sustainability only through financial risk stays inside the usual risk-return framework, while impact- and integrity-based reasoning can change what investors aim for. It names research, policy, regulation, education and litigation as places where interventions can shift these beliefs.

Voltage unbalance between the three phases lowers power quality in distribution grids. This paper shows that medium-voltage charging stations, being three-phase power-electronic devices, can be steered to counter that unbalance, and gives a tractable way to compute their settings, with at least 17.3% less unbalance in a Dutch 10.5 kV case. Grid operators could thus treat large chargers as a power-quality tool, not only as a load.

Designing larger soft-wing kites depends on fast aerodynamic models, because every full-scale prototype campaign is expensive. This campaign gives an open reference data set and shows that a fast vortex-step model and detailed flow simulations both stay within 5 to 10% of measured loads in normal operation, so the fast model can support early design work.

Last-mile delivery in cities can be split between larger vehicles and smaller ones that meet at parking lots or customer locations, but planning these hand-overs is hard. This paper provides a model and fast heuristic for such plans with multiple depots and goods types, and shows how fuel and wage costs change which delivery strategy pays off. Logistics planners can use it to compare last-mile set-ups.

Most activity-based travel models simulate one average day, while real activity patterns span several days. This paper supplies more flexible models of how long people wait between shopping or leisure activities, estimated on two years of Dutch GPS data with household, personal and land-use effects. It is a building block for activity-based models that forecast travel over several days.

Electric powertrain components must fit in a limited space and connect correctly, which constrains which designs are feasible. This framework places, rotates and aligns powertrain components in 3D automatically, shown on a four-wheel-drive electric vehicle, using only basic component properties. It lets engineers include packaging in system-level powertrain design rather than treating it separately.

Grid congestion in the Netherlands blocks new wind and solar projects because there is no room for new connections. This study shows that adding solar panels and a battery behind an existing wind-farm connection can roughly double the energy delivered through the same cable, and that this is already viable at current costs. Developers, grid operators and regulators can use it to assess cable pooling.

Electric vehicles are expensive to produce, partly because each model gets its own tailored motor and battery. This study shows that designing a few standard modules for a whole vehicle family raises energy use slightly but lowers production cost enough to reduce total cost of ownership by 3.5%, and up to 17% in other market conditions. Carmakers can use the method to decide where to standardise.

Choosing motor size and gear ratio early in electric vehicle design needs accurate motor models, but high-fidelity motor tools are computationally expensive. The paper shows that three faster modelling routes reach nearly the same design, with energy-consumption drift below 0.6% in validation. Drivetrain engineers can choose the method that suits their design goals without losing much accuracy.

Megawatt chargers for heavy electric vehicles that connect to the medium-voltage grid need an isolation transformer, which gets smaller as its operating frequency rises. This modulation lets that transformer run at a higher frequency without lowering converter efficiency, pointing to more compact chargers. The gain is in power density and waveform quality of one converter type, shown on a lab prototype.

Energy communities are increasingly limited in selling surplus solar power back to the grid, so they must decide what to do with it. This study finds that sharing surplus with neighbouring households outside the community is the preferred option, even on purely economic grounds. It also warns that steering surplus use through grid buying and selling prices has distributional effects on households, which matters for regulators.

Noise is a common concern for people living near wind energy sites, and kites sound different from turbines. At equal sound level, listeners were more annoyed by sharper sound and by the more tonal fixed-wing kites than by a soft-wing kite, so the character of the sound matters, not only its level. The participants were a convenience sample, so the results are indicative.

Electrification is pushing many European grids to their capacity limits, and network tariffs that cost more at peak times could lower those peaks. National regulators, however, may set tariffs only on grounds of economic efficiency. The article analyses how far that efficiency concept can take in sustainability and energy justice goals, which informs regulators deciding whether and how to introduce time-of-use network tariffs.

Mainstream mobility policy has not solved persistent problems of unsustainability and injustice. This paper shows that Dutch mobility cooperatives already practise collective ownership and self-governance, but stay entangled with an individualist car culture and market rules. It offers a framework contrasting mobility commons with the current regime, and strategies to develop the cooperatives' transformative potential further.

Grid operators planning for mass adoption of solar panels, electric cars and heat pumps need to know which problems appear where. This review sorts the evidence by grid type and technology mix, links each problem to mitigation options such as storage and smart charging, and flags gaps: unbalance, harmonics and power factor are still under-studied for combined technologies.

Many solar inverters, heat pumps and home chargers connect to a single phase, and uneven phase loading causes overheating, wasted capacity and extra losses. This study finds that unbalance becomes high when the three technologies combine, especially in grids that are already heavily loaded, and that limiting device power and consumption reduces it. It shows grid operators which grids and seasons need attention.

Activity-based travel models usually predict one average day, which biases forecasts because people do not shop or go out every day. This paper estimates how regularly people repeat such activities, separating regular from irregular performers in Dutch GPS data. It is a building block for models that forecast travel over several days.

The electric race car is a test case in which a limited battery and component temperatures set the pace. The work shows how an optimal energy plan can be turned into simple real-time instructions for a human driver while staying within 0.22% of the optimum. The link to road vehicles is indirect: the transferable idea is translating optimal energy and thermal management into driver guidance.

Utility grids sometimes need voltage and current compensation that a conventional transformer cannot provide. A hybrid transformer adds a converter rated for only part of the transformer's power to deliver it, and this paper solves a control problem inside that converter. It is an enabling step for one device type, validated at lab scale.

Producing an electric car's battery emits greenhouse gases, and published estimates of how much vary widely. This meta-analysis sets a median of 17.6 kg CO2-equivalent per kg of battery and shows that clean electricity in the factory helps, but large cuts need clean power across the supply chain; higher production volumes also lower emissions per kg. Analysts and policymakers comparing battery supply chains can use these figures.

Mobility systems are usually optimised for average travel time, which can leave people without a car behind. This paper turns justice principles into optimisation objectives for a robotaxi-plus-public-transport system in Eindhoven and shows that the choice of principle changes the resulting plan. That makes fairness a visible design choice for planners, which the authors say needs broader debate.

Thin-film and tandem solar cells for buildings need hole-transport layers that are transparent, conductive and coat textured surfaces evenly. This work shows that the deposition process sets that balance in nickel oxide: more Ni3+ gives lower resistivity but absorbs more light, which helps choose the right process for each application.

Whether a battery suits an electric car or stationary storage depends on how long it lasts and when its ageing suddenly speeds up. This review shows that linear models miss that turning point and that no data-driven model yet targets it or second-life use. That gap matters for anyone planning to reuse car batteries in stationary storage.

Energy communities are presented as a route to a fairer energy transition, but their possible contribution to renewable generation had not been quantified. This study estimates that on current trends they would involve about one in ten Dutch households by 2050, and that reaching the much larger potential requires policies combining professional support with social learning. Policymakers can use the scenarios to weigh local ownership against inclusivity.

Before connecting new loads or generators to a heavily loaded distribution grid, operators must test many combinations of operating conditions, each needing a power-flow calculation. This framework rules most scenarios in or out geometrically, cutting assessment time by at least 76.13% with zero accuracy loss in two test grids. It can shorten the screening step for new connections.

Conventional wind turbines have grown steadily in size, but it is unclear whether airborne wind energy benefits from scale in the same way. Within its assumptions, this study finds it does not: the kite's own weight raises the wind speeds needed to start and reach full power, so the cheapest systems are 100 to 1000 kW. Lifetime operating costs equal or exceed the initial investment, which could ease project financing.

EU energy law has long been framed as a balance between secure, affordable and clean energy, but climate urgency, geopolitical disruption and deepening inequality strain that balance. The article argues that the trilemma still helps structure trade-offs but should be widened to include resilience and justice. It informs EU legislators and policymakers revising the objectives that guide energy law.

Learning curves predict the falling cost of clean technologies well, yet policy rarely builds on them. Applied to heavy electric trucks in Europe, the model shows several tipping points toward fast adoption, and the authors suggest rewarding longer range, faster charging, vehicle-to-grid capability and an open, interoperable network of truck fast chargers. Policymakers can apply the same approach to other clean technologies.

Ride-pooling can cut the vehicle hours needed for the same trips, but its combinatorial nature makes it hard to include in the large network-flow models used for planning. This model adds pooling of several passengers while staying fast to solve, and quantifies how waiting and delay limits change vehicle hours travelled. Planners and fleet designers can include pooling when sizing fleets and infrastructure.

A hosting capacity region tells a grid operator which combinations of loads and generators at several connection points the grid can carry at the same time. A better approximation means more of the real grid capacity can be offered to customers; here the region found grew by up to 62.2% in a Dutch medium-voltage case. It is a computational refinement for operators facing congestion.

Energy models rely on learning rates to project how fast clean technologies get cheaper, and similar curves are proposed for their environmental footprint. Using solar PV data, this study shows that the simplest single-factor experience curve gives the most stable forecasts, and that cost declines come first from innovation and later from economies of scale. Modellers and policymakers should choose learning rates that match the technology's stage.

Battery size, fleet size and charging operations of an electric robotaxi fleet depend on each other. This study shows that for Manhattan a fleet of small, light vehicles with only 20 kWh batteries maximises operator profit, balancing battery wear, fixed costs and efficiency. A small battery means lower cost and material use per vehicle.

Community-owned solar parks are promoted for their local benefits, but whether they pay off for society depends on how they earn their money. This case shows that a park selling its power through the grid has a negative social balance, and proposes selling directly to participating residents to turn that around. Energy communities and regulators can use this when designing business models and rules for local energy trading.

Dutch municipalities must choose how each neighbourhood will be heated without natural gas, while grid capacity, costs and emissions pull in different directions. This tool shows there is no single best heating strategy, while insulation and smart charging of electric cars and boilers are no-regret steps. Municipalities and grid operators can use such shared models to see trade-offs and bottlenecks together and agree on a local strategy.

Modular multilevel converters offer high efficiency and low harmonics but are hard to control, and the voltage ripple on their module capacitors determines how large those capacitors must be. This controller cuts that ripple by 20% while staying light enough to compute in real time. The link to chargers runs through the converter type; the paper itself is a control study.

The airborne wind energy sector has claimed that kites burden neighbours less than wind turbines, but evidence from residents was lacking. This survey at one test site found that only the visual impact was rated better than a nearby wind farm, so easier acceptance cannot be assumed; the authors recommend reducing impacts and developing projects fairly and transparently.

Chargers connected to the medium-voltage grid must keep working when the three phases are unbalanced, for instance during a fault. This paper gives designers formulas to size the converter's capacitors for those conditions, so they are neither oversized nor exposed to excessive ripple. It concerns component sizing for one converter type.

Hybrid vehicles still burn fuel, and both how fast they drive and how they split power between engine and motor determine how much. This work shows that optimising speed and power split together saves 2.6% fuel compared with doing them one after the other. It also proves that eco-driving and lap-time racing are the same mathematical problem, so race-car optimisation tools apply to road vehicles.

The electric race car is a test case in which limited battery energy and charging time decide the result. The work shows that planning energy use and charging while anticipating other cars is worth 21 seconds in a one-hour race, and that electric race cars can compete with conventional ones. The link to road transport is indirect: it lies in jointly planning driving, energy and charging stops.

Hosting capacity is usually given per connection point, ignoring that what one customer uses limits what another can take. Treating the connection points jointly gives grid operators a larger, still safe operating space and 58% faster congestion-management decisions in a Dutch medium-voltage case. Its conservative design suits risk-averse grid operators.

The electric race car is a test case in which charging time and component temperatures limit performance. The study shows that partially charging the battery at stops can beat full charges, and that choosing the number of stops together with stint lengths adds several laps. The trade-off resembles long-distance electric driving on the road, but the paper studies racing only.

A public charger in a residential street is shared by neighbours, and a car left plugged in after charging blocks others. This paper defines which behaviours help or hinder other users and lists 23 measures to steer them, noting that few measures address interaction between users. It gives those who manage public charging a structured overview that includes the social side practice so far rarely targets.

Whether large kite systems pay off depends on how much power they deliver in real winds, and detailed flight simulations are too slow for exploring many designs. This model gives developers and energy modellers quick power curves that capture how wing area, tether size and kite mass change output, and it can be linked to cost models in system design studies.

Bidirectional DC-DC converters, common in DC grids and battery systems, become more compact at high switching frequency, but only if switching stays low-loss. This paper shows that small parasitic resistances in switches and inductor can undermine soft switching and gives equations to set the switching current correctly. It is a design refinement validated on a 1 kW lab converter.

An electric robotaxi fleet's energy use depends on where it can charge, how many riders share a vehicle and which vehicle it uses. For Manhattan, pooling riders cuts fleet energy use and vehicle hours by up to 45%, far more than optimal charger placement (about 1%). Operators and cities can use this to prioritise pooling and match vehicle size to local demand.

Choosing between transport options means trading off goals such as effective mobility, an efficient city, the economy, environment and health, and equity, among many stakeholders. The game gives transport and planning professionals a structured way to discuss these goals together, and participants found it relevant to their daily work. Its effect on actual policy decisions has not yet been tested.

Bipolar DC grids, for example on ships, need a balancing converter to keep both halves at equal voltage when loads differ. This design uses smaller components and switches softly across its whole range, pointing to lighter, lower-loss balancing hardware with simpler control. The contribution is at converter level, validated on a lab setup.

Chargers connected to the medium-voltage grid usually convert power in two stages, each with its own hardware and losses. This single-stage design links the grid straight to a compact isolation transformer, and square-wave operation raises efficiency and power density over sinusoidal operation. It targets lower cost and volume for high-power, bidirectional chargers, shown so far at lab scale.

Renewables have passed an economic tipping point, yet fossil fuel demand has not fallen accordingly. The review argues that cost alone does not tip the energy system and points to social tipping dynamics, with energy communities as a fast-growing niche in which they can be fostered. It offers policy makers and researchers a way to look for levers beyond price.

In a bipolar DC grid, such as one proposed for ships, a balancing converter runs continuously, so its losses add up. This paper maps which operating mode keeps losses lowest at low and at high load, and demonstrates over 99% efficiency at 1.75 kW. Designers can pick the mode that fits their load profile.

Planners of a climate-neutral North Sea power system need to know whether newer wind technologies add value beyond conventional turbines. This study finds that onshore airborne wind can, because it reaches stronger winds and its hourly output partly complements turbines, while floating turbines can cost more and still compete. The authors conclude that airborne wind might play a large role and warrants further study.

Fully automated vehicles, with no driver as backup, must cope with errors in perception or planning that design-time testing cannot rule out. The Safety Shell runs several different driving channels and arbitrates between them, matching or improving safety while letting the vehicle continue its journey more often. The link to the energy transition is indirect: shared automated electric mobility depends on such architectures.

Electric public transport draws power in short peaks, so solar panels serving a traction substation alone produce surplus that must be curtailed, stored or exported. Sharing the system with neighbouring households uses that surplus, cutting curtailment by up to 80% at moments without traction load and raising direct solar coverage by up to 7 percentage points. This makes solar at urban traction substations more feasible for transport operators and residents.

Dutch grid operators must decide where neighbourhood grids need reinforcement as heat pumps, electric cars and solar panels spread. This study finds that heat pumps generally cause the largest problems and electric cars the longest-lasting ones, and that detailed bottom-up models give more pessimistic peak violations than models based on aggregated national data. It shows how much the modelling choice changes the outcome.

The Treaty article that grounds EU energy policy names the internal market, environmental protection and energy solidarity as guiding principles, but social fairness has no clear place in it. The article shows what the provision can and cannot do: it supports balancing competing interests but leaves social concerns largely uncovered. This informs EU legislators and the Court of Justice when interpreting the scope of EU energy law.

Many charging stations on one medium-voltage grid can together distort its voltage, and simulating every charger in detail is too slow for grid studies. This method predicts charger harmonics analytically with high accuracy, so grid operators can include them in network-wide studies and spread the computation. It underpins the harmonic-aware hosting capacity work in the same project.

Local opposition delays or stops wind projects in the Netherlands. This study offers a way to build acceptance into siting decisions from the start, and estimates that roughly 26.5 GW of wind power could still be installed on land when acceptance is taken into account. Project developers and governments can use the approach to reduce impacts, organise participation and make siting more transparent.

The energy yield of fixed-wing kites depends strongly on aerodynamic efficiency, and a box wing makes thinner aerofoils structurally feasible. The open toolchain lets designers screen box-wing layouts quickly and shows when fast methods suffice and when full CFD is needed, at the high angles of attack where kites usually fly.

Soft-wing kites are light, compact and quick to deploy, but their flexible shape makes performance hard to predict, which slows design and control development. This model predicts the deformed wing geometry accurately at low computational cost, providing a structural building block for the next generation of soft-kite simulation models.

Transition models are mostly built by researchers, while the people who must act on the transition, from government to industry, need models they can understand and use. This study identifies use cases for such stakeholders and the design challenges of making models usable for them, including timely delivery and interfaces that connect different models. Model developers can use it to build models for joint exploration with stakeholders.

Power electronics and electric machines need fast control responses while respecting current and voltage limits. This paper gives a practical recipe that combines the speed of deadbeat control with the constraint handling of predictive control. The link to the transition runs through better-controlled converters; the paper is control theory with benchmark examples.

Remote sites off the grid mostly run on diesel generators, which are costly to supply and emit CO2. This study shows that adding airborne wind, solar and batteries can lower electricity cost compared with diesel-only supply, and its open-source framework lets planners size such hybrid systems for other locations.

Ultrafast chargers for vehicles with large batteries can connect to the medium-voltage grid through a single compact transformer, but the converter stages around it still lose energy every time they switch. This scheme makes the output stage switch softly over the whole load range, cutting switching losses and current stress and so raising charger efficiency. It was validated on a scaled-down prototype.

Network tariffs decide who pays for the grid, and the EU Court of Justice has ruled that only independent national regulators may set them. The article argues that tariff setting involves political choices, not just technical assessment, and examines where the Netherlands and the proposed Dutch Energy Act draw the line between regulator and government. It informs Dutch and EU legislators deciding how much steering governments keep over regulators.

As subsidies phase out, wind plant owners are exposed to fluctuating electricity prices, and power produced in low winds fetches more. This work shows that designing kite systems only for lowest cost per MWh overlooks that value, and offers a profit-based metric to balance cost against value in system design.

DC grids in which converters share power through communication links can be disrupted by falsified data. This mechanism lets each converter check its own sensors and its neighbours' data, and in tests it caught every attack with signal-estimation errors below 3.9%. The link to the transition runs through the security of networked power electronics.

Shipping has to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and electric ships need efficient onboard grids. A bipolar DC grid can feed large propulsion loads and smaller loads at half voltage from the same bus and offers a second path if one pole fails, but it needs voltage balancing and suitable protection. This overview sets out the research agenda that later work in the project addresses.

Current national climate pledges and policies are not enough to keep warming well below 2 °C. This multi-model study shows that adopting policies that already worked elsewhere, especially in energy supply, helps cut emissions in every major economy studied, but that more ambition is needed on top. Governments can use it to see which proven policies to scale up, and how far that alone would take them.

Logistics companies switching to electric vehicles must plan routes around limited range and charging, while electricity tariffs differ in how finely they price time. This study shows that time-of-use and spot pricing reduce fleet costs and move charging to low-price hours, which the authors link to environmental benefits. The results inform fleet operators and policy makers designing charging tariffs for logistics.

Modular multilevel converters can make fast-charging stations and renewable plants perform better at lower cost, but their many modules make current control hard. This controller looks much further ahead than linearised alternatives while still meeting real-time limits, and improves capacitor voltage behaviour in an ultrafast-charger topology. It is a control-design study.

The electric race car is a test case in which battery capacity and charging time limit how far the car can go. The study shows that driving flat out is very costly and that choosing the number of charging stops together with stint lengths gains several laps. The trade-off between speed and charging time resembles long-distance electric road travel, but the paper studies racing only.

Long-lived, costly infrastructure has to be designed now for conditions decades ahead that nobody can predict. The case is water management, not energy: the study shows how robust simulation finds pumping-station designs that hold up across many futures and makes the trade-offs explicit for decision-makers. Grid and other energy infrastructure face the same design problem, though the paper does not test the method there.

Grid operators face overloaded local cables as more electric cars charge at homes and street chargers, and smart charging needs digital infrastructure that is not yet in place everywhere. This study shows that simple fixed charging schedules can already postpone or even avoid costly reinforcement of low-voltage cables. Grid operators and charge-point operators can use them as a short-term measure until smarter coordination is available.

Today's kite systems reach several hundred kilowatts, while utility-scale use needs megawatt units that do not yet exist. This open reference system gives researchers and developers a common 3 MW design and simulation model to study control, loads and power output at that scale, and it became the basis of the MegAWES framework used in later studies.

Mobility as a service promises to draw people out of private cars by offering a package of multimodal transport services. For Amsterdam, this study finds that the emission effect depends on the scenario: from 3-4% in a conservative case to 43-54% in an optimistic one. City policymakers can use these ranges to judge what mobility as a service can deliver.

Local opposition can delay or block energy projects, raising costs and slowing progress on renewable targets. This review shows that expectations of easy acceptance for airborne wind energy rest on little evidence, and calls for empirical studies of how residents actually respond, including the role of planning and trust in developers.

The electric race car is a test case for fast, globally optimal powertrain design. The framework shows that the best transmission depends on how battery and motor are sized, so design and energy management must be optimised together. The convex modelling of battery, motor and transmission is general and can be used to size powertrains for road vehicles.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries must draw up long-term low-emission strategies that together meet the global temperature goal. This study gives national pathways for eleven major economies and finds that renewables, efficiency and electrification do most of the work, and that shifting investment to low-carbon technologies does not create serious affordability problems in most countries. Governments can use it to check national plans against the global goal.

Combining a bicycle with a train can compete with the car for many trips, and its uptake depends on many factors at and around stations. This study shows that Dutch travellers will cycle further to a station if it saves them a train transfer, and gives willingness-to-pay values for cycling, parking and train time. Transport modellers and planners can use these values in cost-benefit analyses and network design.

Agent-based models show how complex systems behave but rarely tell decision-makers which strategy works best. This framework adds optimisation to such models at low computing cost, tested on the spread of a new product through a population. The link to the energy transition is indirect: the method could help find strategies in agent-based models of technology adoption, but the paper does not apply it to energy.

Shared, self-driving electric vehicles could change how many and what kind of vehicles a country needs, which drives material use and energy demand. For the Netherlands, this study finds that 80-90% fewer vehicles would suffice even if people travel much more, and that most could be small one-person vehicles. This gives policymakers and planners a quantified scenario for discussing the resource and cost impact of automated mobility.

Passenger transport uses a large and growing amount of energy, and electrification is only one of the changes under way. This study finds that electrification cuts vehicle energy use by about 75%, autonomous driving by up to 40% more and one-person vehicles by a further 50-60%, so Dutch daily use could fall from 600 to 50-150 TJ even if travel grows by 30-150%.

Soft kites for airborne wind energy use an unusual wing section with an inflated tube at the front, for which no systematic measured data existed. These measurements give designers and modellers reference lift and drag curves, and show that the point where the flow turns turbulent must be modelled to predict performance near stall.

Batteries in energy communities are expensive and often underused, because each one stores only its owner's energy. This study shows that letting members use each other's spare battery capacity, coordinated by the community, improves both financial returns and use of the installed storage, with results sensitive to prices. Energy communities can use the approach to compare ownership and sharing arrangements before they invest.

Kite power systems generate energy in fast crosswind manoeuvres, so controllers and power predictions depend on how a flexible kite responds to steering. This validation shows the coupled model reproduces steering sensitivity and wing twist from real flights, while drag modelling still needs work before the model can predict speed, tether force and power reliably.

Soft-kite developers still tune flight controllers largely through costly prototype testing. A dynamic simulation that predicts how strongly the kite turns for a given steering input, matching values measured in two flight campaigns, can move part of that tuning to the computer. It also shows that more powered settings give tighter turns and more control authority.

Scaling up soft-wing kites requires predicting how the wing and its many bridle lines deform under load, which earlier models simplified. This structural model handles both together, runs fast and matches measured shapes in most load cases, giving kite designers a building block to couple with aerodynamic models.

DC power systems on ships allow bipolar layouts that can raise efficiency and power density. This study quantifies the price: a three-conductor bipolar bus helps critical low-power loads stay powered but makes propulsion less reliable, so the best layout depends on which loads matter most. Ship designers can use the method to make that trade-off explicit.

Soft kites change shape strongly in flight, while aerodynamic analyses often assume the undeformed design shape. This work provides measured in-flight deformation data for depowering and turning, which kite designers can use to validate aero-structural models; the authors also see it as a route to monitoring the wing shape for near real-time control.

Camera perception for automated driving must segment objects and follow them across video frames, and tuning a tracker for each new dataset costs engineering effort. This study shows that a two-stage tracker tuned on a related dataset transfers well, with rank correlations of 0.48 to 0.79 between datasets. The link to the energy transition is indirect: cheaper perception development supports automated, shared electric mobility.

Robotaxi fleets will share roads with private cars, and their routing choices change congestion for everyone. This analysis finds that a fleet operator gains almost nothing from predicting how private drivers will react, suggesting that the harder leader-follower formulation is not needed in this setting. Modellers of shared automated mobility can use this to keep fleet planning simpler.

Camera perception for automated driving must segment street scenes, estimate distances and track objects at the same time. This model does all three in one network and improves accuracy over earlier methods on two street-scene benchmarks. The link to the energy transition is indirect: efficient camera perception is one requirement for automated, shared electric mobility.

Once automated vehicles are on public roads, developers need to spot new hazards without a human driver reporting them. This framework compares the perception and plans of parallel driving systems to flag 86% of hazardous situations in simulation and trace likely causes, using the indicators that the UL4600 standard recommends. The link to the energy transition is indirect: shared automated electric fleets depend on such monitoring.

Automated driving systems that switch between redundant channels can become unsafe if the switch itself destabilises the vehicle, for example in an emergency on a slippery road. This framework screens proposed trajectories quickly, with 98% precision for unsafe cases, and then checks vehicle dynamics under uncertain road friction. The link to the energy transition is indirect: shared automated electric vehicles need safe fallback behaviour.

This is control theory with an indirect link to the transition. Digital controllers and communication links have limited resolution, which can spoil coordination between many units; the method keeps the resulting error provably small. The test case is a vehicle platoon, and in this project the same multi-agent view is used to balance the modules of fast-charger converters.

The electric superbike is a test case. The study shows that deciding how to split drive force between the wheels together with motor, battery and gearing cuts energy use by up to 22% on a demanding cycle, alongside tests on regulatory cycles. The same joint sizing applies to electric two-wheelers in general, where lower energy use allows a smaller battery.

Solar panels on electric cars generate energy but also add production emissions. The study finds the panels worthwhile in countries with high solar irradiation, but where grid electricity is already low-carbon the extra emissions need a long vehicle life to break even. Carmakers and policymakers can use the framework to judge where solar electric vehicles reduce emissions.

Designing one set of motor and battery modules for several car models requires motor models that are accurate and still fast to optimise. This model makes motor geometry a design variable in family optimisation while keeping the problem quickly solvable, with accuracy in line with detailed motor software. Carmakers can use it to size shared modules for city cars, compact cars and crossovers.

Ride-pooling can reduce the vehicle hours needed for the same trips, but is hard to include in planning models. This paper adds two-person pooling to standard network-flow models and finds that with enough demand and at most 5 minutes of waiting and delay, over 90% of requests can be shared. Planners can use it to include pooling in fleet design studies.

The physical layout of an electric powertrain constrains which designs fit in a vehicle. This framework automates the placement and connection of components in two dimensions, so packaging can be considered alongside powertrain sizing. It gives engineers an automated starting point for layouts in early design.

Soft kites deform when they steer, and this turning behaviour matters for both kite design and flight control in airborne wind energy. The framework lets researchers simulate steady turning flight of a deforming kite and derive turning laws, which the authors see as input for better kite and controller design.

Solid-state transformers use power electronics and a high-frequency link in place of a conventional transformer, but their DC-link capacitors must absorb ripple at twice the grid frequency. This control strategy reduces that ripple, which could shrink the capacitors and so the unit. No size figure is given; it is a converter-level control study.

Offshore sites could avoid some local impacts of airborne wind energy, but coastal communities still have a stake in what happens at sea. This early study explores their views, which matters for siting offshore kite systems.

Robotaxis could ease or worsen city congestion, depending on how many people share rides and how many empty repositioning trips the fleet makes. For Manhattan, this study finds a threshold: at least 40% of users must accept pooling, otherwise empty trips can raise average travel time by up to 15%. The result gives cities and operators a pooling threshold to test robotaxi plans against.

Modular multilevel converters, a candidate for medium-voltage fast chargers, contain many modules whose capacitor voltages must stay equal. This paper treats the modules as cooperating agents and gives a controller that brings them together faster while keeping each within limits. It is mainly control theory; the converter is one of its benchmark examples.

Coordinating when cars charge and heat pumps run can make better use of local solar power and limit grid imports. This study finds that vehicle-to-grid is seldom worthwhile at current charger round-trip efficiency but would be used much more if that efficiency improves. Charger efficiency is therefore a condition for vehicle-to-grid to play a larger role.

Converters that feed power through a transformer, as in medium-voltage chargers, can drive its core into saturation when a small DC current builds up, raising losses and risking malfunction. This method detects and removes that bias from the DC-link current measurement and stays stable despite phase errors in the measurement. It supports reliable transformer-based converters.

Converters in a DC grid need small auxiliary supplies for their own electronics, and in a bipolar grid these should survive the loss of one pole. This design keeps power flowing by switching between poles, adding resilience to bipolar DC grids such as those proposed for ships. It is a component-level contribution, demonstrated experimentally.

Motor design for cars often relies on costly trial and error or on simplified models that stretch an efficiency map. This paper shows that motor geometry can be optimised directly with high-fidelity simulation inside a vehicle model, although the gain for a city car was small (0.13%). It gives drivetrain engineers a systematic route to tailor motors to vehicles.

Highly automated vehicles must handle rare edge cases without a human as fallback. This study tests the Safety Shell beyond simple deterministic simulations, finds it safer and more available than each driving system alone, and identifies requirements for the channels themselves. The link to the energy transition is indirect: shared automated electric mobility needs this level of safety.

Electric car sales depend on whether models match what buyers want at a price they accept. This market simulation shows that manufacturers who design a family of electric models together sell more electric cars than those who tailor each model separately. Carmakers and policymakers can use the framework to test how design strategies affect electric vehicle uptake.

Axial-flux motors can be built into wheels, but sizing them in vehicle design needs scaling models like those available for conventional radial-flux motors. This paper provides such models and finds that four in-wheel motors give the lowest energy use but the highest material cost. Engineers can use them to weigh efficiency against material use when choosing a powertrain layout.

Grid operators usually decide how many fast chargers a feeder can take from power and voltage limits, but charger electronics also emit harmonics that add up as power levels rise. This method lets operators include those harmonics without detailed converter models, and a Dutch case shows harmonic limits can matter where background distortion is already high.

Hosting capacity region methods had been limited to distribution grids, while transmission grids also need to fit more energy units. Describing the joint safe operating space of those units lets a network host more of them at once through coordinated operation, and this paper makes that computation workable at transmission level with small accuracy loss. It is a methods paper tested on a benchmark, not a real grid.

Smart charging can prevent grid problems from large EV fleets, but most schemes assume drivers' plans and solar output are known in advance. This study shows which uncertainties affect energy delivered and which affect cost, and finds that protecting against the worst case adds very little to charging cost.

Converters that connect chargers or solid-state transformers to the medium-voltage grid must meet limits on harmonic distortion. This paper shows that tuning the carrier phases of the modulation improves waveform quality, but gains at one terminal come at a cost at the other, so designers must choose. It is a modulation setting that affects power quality, validated in simulation and hardware.

Lithium-ion chemistries differ in efficiency and weight, so a pack that mixes two of them can perform better than a single-chemistry pack. This study shows that combining NCA and NMC cells gives the lowest energy use for a passenger car, balancing efficiency against added weight. Battery-pack designers can apply the method using only manufacturer datasheets.

Shared electric fleets could support the grid by feeding power back when idle, but the extra cycling wears their batteries. This study for Eindhoven finds that vehicle-to-grid does not reduce the number of trips served, but battery-wear costs can exceed the revenue. Fleet operators and grid operators therefore need to account for degradation when designing vehicle-to-grid schemes.

Square-wave operation gives fast-charger converters lower pulsating power and lets them use fewer modules, but makes their currents harder to control. This controller tracks the square-shaped signals with guaranteed convergence and within limits, keeping pulsating power 44.4% below sinusoidal operation in simulation. It makes a more compact charger topology easier to control.

Noise is a common reason for opposition to wind projects. Measuring how people rate the sound of kite power systems in a controlled setting gives developers an early basis to design quieter systems before they are deployed near homes.

Optimising mobility for average travel time can leave some people with poor accessibility. This study shows that an intermodal robotaxi and public transport system in Eindhoven can be planned for fair accessibility at only a slight increase in travel time. It also shows that the definition of fairness changes the result, which matters for planners setting goals.

Nickel oxide contact layers give a higher yield of working perovskite single-junction and tandem cells when combined with organic layers, but on their own they lose voltage. This work traces that loss to defects at the nickel oxide/perovskite interface rather than to the oxide's resistivity, pointing efforts towards interface passivation and fair comparison with state-of-the-art contact layers.

Megawatt kite systems produce strongly pulsating power because gravity slows and speeds up the kite in each loop, and generators and grid connections must handle the peaks. New controllers for a 3 MW reference system stop it drawing power during reel-out and cut the output range by 75%, lowering peak power.

When several large users share a radial grid, coordinating their operation within a joint feasible region lets the grid deliver more power than fixed per-connection limits allow. This paper refines how that region is computed, aiming to capture more of it than a single inner approximation does. It is a short methods contribution for grid operators facing congestion.

Electric aircraft need batteries that are safe and cool enough without adding much weight. For an 8-seat aircraft, this study quantifies the trade-off: water cooling works best but adds 16.5% weight and cuts range from 480 to 410 km, while the design withstands a heating-induced thermal runaway scenario. Aircraft designers can use the framework to size battery and cooling together.

Siting conflicts often appear only once a project is announced. A role-playing game lets developers, officials and residents rehearse those conflicts in advance and see the project through each other's eyes, which can improve how airborne wind projects are planned and discussed.

In a ground-generation kite system the tether drives a winch and generator on the ground, and the winch size shapes how the whole system responds. This work gives designers of megawatt-scale systems a method to set an upper limit on winch size so that tether force follows its target without overshoot or oscillation, tested on the 3 MW MegAWES design.

Balancing converters in bipolar DC grids, for example on ships, must be both efficient and compact, and these goals pull against each other. This paper shows how to trade them off systematically for a 3 kW unit cooled without fans. It is a design method for one component.

A small DC current through a converter's transformer can push the core towards saturation, raising losses or even stopping the converter. Existing fixes need costly sensing or degrade performance; this method relies on the DC-link current instead. That supports reliable, compact transformer-based converters such as those in medium-voltage-connected chargers.

Energy communities must make investment decisions with uncertain returns, limited time and unequal information among members. The game lets people experience those decisions, and players learned how energy communities work. The study also shows that a structured design-science process helps researchers from different disciplines build such tools together, which matters for cross-disciplinary research programmes.

The capacitors in each module of a modular multilevel converter must be sized for the ripple they will carry. This paper gives the formulas to do that for the direct AC/AC type studied for medium-voltage-connected chargers, helping designers avoid oversized or undersized modules. It is a sizing tool, validated at lab scale.

Automated vehicles hand control back to humans far more often because sensors and software misjudge a situation than because of hardware faults: five times more often in California's 2021 reports. This study classifies such insufficiencies and shows that switching to another, even less advanced, driving system at the right moment can avoid them. The link to the energy transition is indirect: shared automated electric vehicles depend on such safety.

DC grids at 1400 V need converters whose switches can block that voltage. This study shows that stacking two lower-voltage MOSFETs can cut losses compared with a single high-voltage switch, giving converter designers a more efficient option. It is a device-level comparison for one case study.

Modular multilevel converters, used in renewable generation and fast-charging stations, only work well if all module capacitor voltages stay balanced. Treating each module as an agent that coordinates with others, this controller provides that balance with proven stability, as a distributed alternative to central control. Results so far are from simulation.

With much solar power in the grid, electricity prices swing over the day, and electric fleets can charge cheaply and sell back. For a robotaxi fleet in Gold Coast, Australia, solar roofs cut total operating cost by 10 to 15%, and larger batteries can even earn money through vehicle-to-grid. Fleet operators can use the model to decide on battery size and solar equipment.

Designing electric mobility involves choices from individual powertrain components up to entire vehicle fleets. This overview shows how NEON links component-level powertrain models with fleet-level optimisation and sets out next steps. It is a summary for an industry audience rather than a new result.

Parked electric cars could help the system operator keep frequency stable, but reserves are called unpredictably, which complicates commitments made a day ahead. This energy management approach offers a consistent amount of capacity and still meets charging needs, though accounting for real calls cuts regulation income by up to 66%. That gives a more realistic estimate of what such services earn.

Electric cars cut greenhouse gas emissions but keep other drawbacks of cars: material use, parking space, noise and accidents. This paper shows that shared autonomous electric vehicles could provide the same personal mobility with fleets needing over fifteen times fewer resources and over a hundred times less parking space. That points to cities with more street space for people and lower demand for vehicle materials.

Neighbourhood mobility hubs, offering shared cars, bikes and other vehicles, are meant to reduce car use and free up public space. This study finds that people who already travel sustainably are the most likely users, so hubs may do less to cut car use than hoped, or even increase it, although they can help sustainable travellers keep travelling that way.

Cities and operators choose between docked and free-floating shared bikes and scooters. For Manhattan, this study finds that adding docking stations brings travel times down to about the level of a dockless system, after which more stations add little, and that a little rebalancing by the operator is enough. Municipalities and operators can use this to size station networks.

Electric cars charging in the early evening add to the peak on local grids, and earlier studies underestimated how far that charging can be moved. Using realistic travel patterns, this study finds that more than 80% of the evening charging peak could be avoided. It indicates that electric cars can help balance the grid and absorb more renewable power, which matters for grid operators and charging providers.

Grid operators need to know how much electricity heat pumps will draw before they are installed, often without data on each building's heat demand. This model gives a cautious estimate from weather and device data, suited to grid impact studies, and shows that stricter insulation and energy-label norms reduce that demand.

Electric cars can use a single-speed or a multi-speed transmission, and the choice affects energy use, cost and performance. This framework links gearbox component design to powertrain sizing and shows that, for a small family car, two speeds save only 0.5% energy while meeting gradeability requirements. Drivetrain engineers can use it to judge whether added transmission complexity pays off.

Modular multilevel converters serve high-power uses such as renewable generation and DC transmission, and are candidates for medium-voltage chargers; all their modules must stay balanced. This paper applies consensus control to that task, allowing distributed balancing that keeps working if a module fails. It is an early control-theory step, shown in simulation.

Kite power developers report costs in different ways, which makes concepts hard to compare for investors and planners. This proposal for a shared cost model is a forerunner of the reference economic model for airborne wind energy published openly in 2024.

On a ship with a bipolar DC grid, unequal loads on the two halves shift the neutral voltage, so a balancing converter must correct it continuously. A resonant design can switch with low losses and use smaller passive components, which matters for weight and efficiency on board. This conference paper is the starting point for the balancing-converter designs refined in later work of the project.

Investors, researchers and policymakers need an overview of who is developing airborne wind energy and how far each concept has come. A shared database of developers and prototypes provides that overview and makes progress in the sector easier to follow.

Engineering teams tend to set aside the non-technical complexity around the systems they design because they see it as outside their expertise. This approach helps them articulate such problems and start generating solutions, and was found most useful early in a project. The link to the energy transition is indirect: it supports multidisciplinary design teams, such as those working on energy and mobility systems, rather than a specific technology.

Neural networks on resource-constrained embedded devices must balance accuracy and speed, and finding good designs normally requires access to the target hardware. This method predicts inference time from network building blocks and reaches similar designs without that hardware. The link to the energy transition is indirect: efficient embedded perception supports automated, shared electric mobility.

Every bipolar DC grid needs balancing converters, and soft switching lowers their losses and electromagnetic emissions. This paper shows under which modulation schemes a series-resonant balancing converter achieves soft switching, groundwork for the efficient designs in later papers. It is a converter analysis without a system-level result.

The higher purchase price of electric cars is a major barrier to wider uptake. Sharing standard motor and battery modules across models allows economies of scale, and this study shows the efficiency penalty is only 3.2% in operating costs for a city car, compact car and SUV. That penalty could be outweighed by lower development and production costs.

Automated vehicles are expected to cut emissions and road deaths, but only if they reach very high safety levels without a supervising driver. The Safety Shell adds parallel driving channels and an arbiter, so safety can grow with more channels while the vehicle still completes its trip. The link to the energy transition is indirect and rests on the expected benefits of automated, shared electric mobility.

Pumping kite systems generate while reeling out and use some power while reeling in, so their raw output pulses and must be smoothed before it reaches the grid. Comparing drivetrain concepts helps developers choose how to do this; a related full paper compares the costs of three such concepts.

Electric robotaxi fleets need charging stations, and where they are placed affects how far the vehicles drive empty. For Manhattan, this study shows that optimised siting beats rules of thumb, that more stations help only up to a point, and that vehicles with smaller batteries use about 12% less energy despite more charging trips. Fleet operators and cities can use it to plan charging infrastructure.

There is a gap between high-level powertrain sizing and detailed electric-motor design. This framework links the two with a fast convex motor model and finds the energy-optimal motor design and gear ratio for a compact car, with small errors against detailed simulation. It gives motor designers a starting point that is matched to the vehicle.

Electric-motor temperature limits how much power is available during extended driving, so it has to be part of powertrain design. This study shows that permanent-magnet temperature is the limiting factor, and that a continuously variable transmission lowers motor losses and temperatures, cutting energy use and leaving room for smaller motors. Powertrain designers can use the models to size motors with thermal limits included.

Government, industry and other stakeholders in the energy and mobility transitions use models to communicate and exchange their views of how the system should change. This study describes three use cases where models help them and lists requirements for making such models useful in practice, including how separate models could be integrated. Model developers can use these requirements when building models meant for stakeholders.

Electric cars spread faster when vehicles and chargers from different firms work together, but agreeing on open standards is slow, and one firm controlling the whole chain risks monopoly. The paper compares battery electric vehicles with game consoles and payment terminals to identify the conditions under which a technology with a complex value chain can spread without such market inefficiencies.

Battery size, fleet size and charging schedules of a robotaxi fleet affect each other: smaller batteries cost less and use less energy but need more frequent charging. For New York City, this study shows that much smaller batteries than earlier studies assumed are viable, cutting energy use by up to 20%. That means lower cost and material use per vehicle for shared electric fleets.

Box wings make thinner aerofoils structurally feasible for fixed-wing kites, whose energy yield depends strongly on aerodynamic efficiency. The full 2023 study found that fast panel methods suffice at low angles of attack, while CFD is needed at the high angles where kites usually fly.

The electric race car is a test case. The study shows how distributing torque over individually driven wheels makes better use of grip, and that the rear motor matters most for sizing because the rear tyres carry more load under acceleration. The link to road vehicles is indirect: the convex method for sizing motors in multi-motor powertrains is the transferable part.

Soft kites change shape under load and when steered, so design and control tools need a structural model fast enough to run inside simulations. This early work led to the particle-system model published in 2023, which predicts the deformed wing shape at low computational cost.

Remote off-grid sites depend largely on costly diesel generators. The full 2023 study showed that mixing airborne wind, solar PV and batteries with diesel can lower electricity cost, and released an open sizing framework for such plants.

Travel habits are hard to break, which slows the move from the car to cycling, public transport and shared modes. This paper argues, with examples from Dutch and Northern European practice, that moving house and building new homes are moments when those habits can change, and offers a conceptual model of how this works.

Structural design of fixed-wing kites is slowed by building a new finite-element mesh for every design variant. An open tool that generates these meshes from a few parameters lets kite designers analyse more variants for the same effort; the link to the energy transition is indirect, through lighter and cheaper kites.

Automated vehicles still cause collisions through missed or false object detections, so they need supervision or tightly controlled settings. This abstract shows that cross-checking several channels lowers collision risk for missed detections and avoids most unnecessary stops for false detections. The link to the energy transition is indirect: shared automated electric vehicles must be both safe and available.

Ultrafast chargers connected to the medium-voltage grid lose energy in each power stage, including the converter that feeds the vehicle battery. This scheme reduces reactive power, switching losses and capacitor current in that stage compared with standard phase-shift control, and shows how it affects the number of modules needed upstream. It is a simulation study; the same scheme was later tested on a prototype.

This abstract set out a research programme on how people respond to energy-producing kites, at a time when the technology was still in the test phase. The resulting studies, listed separately, give the sector evidence on acceptance before commercial deployment.

In a medium-voltage-connected charger built on a modular multilevel converter, pulsating power in the arms sets how much energy the module capacitors must buffer. Square-wave operation lowers that pulsation, so less stored energy and fewer modules are needed, pointing to a smaller charger. Later papers in the project build their controllers and prototypes on this operating mode.

A pumping kite generates while reeling out and draws power while reeling in, so its output oscillates and must be smoothed before it is fed into the grid. This study compares the cost of doing so with three storage types for a megawatt-scale system, giving developers guidance on which drivetrain to choose.

The medium-frequency transformer in a medium-voltage-connected charger stays compact and efficient only if its core does not drift into saturation. This paper uses a control capability the converter already has to keep the transformer balanced. It is one of several flux-balancing methods in the same thesis aimed at reliable, compact megawatt chargers.

Ultrafast charging stations normally sit behind a line-frequency transformer that adds cost and volume. This paper shows that a modular multilevel converter with full-bridge modules can cover the voltage range from the medium-voltage grid to a charging DC bus without that transformer. It is an early analysis that the later single-stage charger design builds on.

Removing the line-frequency transformer from fast-charging stations cuts their cost and volume, but the converter must still provide isolation and handle power in both directions. This paper identifies the direct AC/AC modular multilevel converter as the most promising topology for that role, which set the direction for the charger developed in the project. Results are from simulation.

Stricter maritime rules on greenhouse gas emissions push ship operators towards electric propulsion, which raises the question of how to lay out the onboard grid. For a ferry with a bipolar DC grid, this study finds a zonal layout potentially more stable than a radial one, a point ship designers can weigh early. It is a modelling study of one test case.

For e-scooters and e-mopeds, total cost of ownership depends on how battery, motor and transmission are sized for where they are used. This study shows that the best design depends strongly on local terrain, and that regenerative braking or variable gearing may not pay off for these light vehicles. Manufacturers and fleet operators can use the method to lower ownership costs.

The electric race car is a test case in which motor temperature limits performance. The study shows which motor parts overheat first and how much heating changes the optimal energy strategy, and suggests that a continuously variable transmission could improve lap time. The thermal modelling approach also applies to motor design for road electric vehicles.

Utility-scale airborne wind energy needs kites of several megawatts, which have not yet been built, so studies depend on representative designs. This reference design and framework give researchers a shared basis to estimate power curves and test control strategies at that scale; it grew into the open MegAWES model used in later studies.

The electric race car is a test case for comparing transmission technologies quickly. The study shows that a continuously variable transmission lets the motor work more efficiently and harder, outweighing its own losses and weight. The fast modelling method is the part that carries over to choosing transmissions for road electric vehicles.

Energy costs weigh hardest on vulnerable households, yet EU law has no clear standard for what affordable energy means. The chapter argues that a right to energy grounded in human-rights law could push member states to build national affordability frameworks; without it, better coordination and targeted distributional measures could ease financial stress. It informs EU and national legislators deciding how to protect vulnerable energy consumers.

The EU energy transition has moved from developing individual renewable technologies to fitting them into one working system, and research and innovation policy has to follow. The chapter makes the case for a systems-based approach with more coordination, public involvement and institutional reform, and for supporting bottom-up actors such as small firms and energy communities. It is written for EU and national policymakers.

Decarbonising, decentralising and digitalising the energy system spreads costs and benefits unevenly, and law has to decide how. The chapter argues that energy justice can serve as a legal instrument across the whole economy to steer legislative and judicial decisions toward fairer outcomes, while warning that its trade-offs limit what it can achieve. It informs legislators and courts weighing the distributional effects of climate measures.

Wind and solar output varies, while the grid must stay within tight voltage and frequency limits, so power systems need storage and other flexibility. Storing compressed air underground is one option. The chapter reviews the legal framework that applies to such storage, which matters to legislators and regulators setting rules for storage in the power system.

Energy communities could organise part of the energy system locally, but market participation assumes high liquidity, professional staff and large volumes that communities lack and often do not want. The chapter maps these obstacles and the societal conditions that help communities scale up. It argues that making room for them requires changes in how the current energy system is organised.

Transition policies are judged on fairness as well as emissions, and governments need practical ways to see who gains and who loses. The chapter presents the energy justice framework as such a toolkit for just transition policy: correcting past harms and making energy and climate strategies hold up in future. It sets the frame of the volume for policy makers and researchers working on just transitions.

A fair transition requires knowing who is energy-poor, which technologies serve society, and who must act. The chapter draws the volume's lessons into a toolkit on three fronts: defining and measuring energy vulnerability, matching new and established technologies to societal needs, and the motives and measures of policymakers and corporations. It sets an agenda for future energy justice research.

Grid operators need simple ways to check whether added loads, generators or storage stay within grid limits. Describing those limits as a joint feasible region makes it easier to check operating plans and to optimise storage against them. It is a methods chapter with one Dutch medium-voltage case.

In electric vehicles the battery and powertrain must fit the chassis, so component sizing and physical layout constrain each other. This preprint makes automated 3D packaging robust and fast enough to run inside a system-level design optimisation, where it beats a discretised exhaustive search at lower computing cost. It lets vehicle engineers explore powertrain and battery layouts together in early design.

Airborne wind energy is close to its first commercial sites, and permitting will depend on how nearby residents respond. This report gives policymakers, regulators and developers practical guidance drawn from field surveys and experiments, so that siting and engagement can be planned before conflicts arise.

The electric race car is a test case in which battery energy and charging stops are the binding limits. The work shows that strategy changes fundamentally once other vehicles and their slipstream are included, compared with optimising one car alone. The link to road transport is indirect: the transferable part is a method for planning energy use and charging when other vehicles influence the outcome.

Kites for airborne wind energy and wind-assisted ship propulsion need many design iterations, and full flow simulations are too slow for that. This validated fast model makes rapid load, stability and design studies possible, and reveals a trade-off between aerodynamic efficiency and stability that calls for multi-objective optimisation. It is meant for the conceptual and preliminary design phases.

Cell geometry and electrode design set how much energy a battery stores per kilogram and how much resistance it has, and these choices are needed early in vehicle design. This lightweight model maps those design variables to cell performance and shows the main trade-offs. It is built to be embedded in battery-pack and vehicle optimisation, so cells can be sized together with the vehicle.

Mobility systems built around the car need deep change to become just and sustainable, and citizen movements are a possible driver that has received little study. The Amelisweerd case shows a local movement building broad coalitions around alternatives by adapting its strategy over fifty years, with ideological entrenchment at national level as its largest obstacle. It presents such movements as actors in governing the mobility transition.

Energy communities usually treat electric cars as batteries parked at one spot. This preprint lets cars use bidirectional chargers wherever they park, so energy taken on at one site can be used at another, and studies how battery ageing and seasons affect the benefit. It points to a role for vehicle-to-grid across sites to lower community energy costs.

Grid operators can fit more users into congested grids if they know the combined operating limits of all of them, but computing those limits gets heavy as their number grows. This compression makes an eight-dimensional case tractable and cuts solving time of related grid tasks by 52.9% or more, losing no more than 1.36% optimality. It is a computational tool, tested so far on two Dutch medium-voltage cases.

Robotaxis and shared micromobility can be combined in one trip, but it is unclear how each service affects the other. This preprint quantifies their interaction on a test network: growth in one mode raises use of the other, and rebalancing micromobility reduces empty robotaxi repositioning. Operators and planners can use it to size combined services.

Airborne wind energy companies will soon ask communities to host their first sites, while almost nobody has experience with the technology. This guide translates good practice from onshore wind into steps that fit kites, which can help avoid the local opposition that has slowed conventional wind projects.

In the rural north of the Netherlands many households depend on two or more cars, bus lines are disappearing, and the debate centres on replacing petrol cars with electric ones. This vision argues for travelling less and differently as well, through community-run shared transport, mobility hubs and services brought closer to villages. It gives the northern provinces and municipalities a shared direction, not a worked-out policy.

Electric motorcycles have limited space for battery, motor and electronics, and where these parts sit affects handling. This preprint automates their placement and finds layouts that improve handling by 2.5% over existing designs. The link to the energy transition is indirect: it is a design tool for compact electric two-wheelers.

The electric race car is a test case. The controller finds and tracks the wheel slip that gives the best traction and regenerative braking without a model of the tyres. The link to road vehicles is indirect: slip control for regenerative braking is the transferable part, but the preprint tests only racing in simulation.

Managing congested distribution grids involves optimisation problems that must respect cable and voltage limits, and repeated power-flow calculations make them slow. Compressing those limits into a compact set of constraints makes it easier to build grid physics into practical management tools. It is a preprint letter on method, without a field application.

Modular multilevel converters, considered for ultrafast chargers connected to the medium-voltage grid, are usually run by several separately tuned control loops that are hard to set up for safe operation. This design replaces them with one controller that has convergence and safety guarantees, which supports reliable operation of such chargers. It is a control method, validated at lab scale.

Investors and policy makers cannot compare kite power concepts while each developer reports costs in its own way. This openly published reference model, built by industry and academia together, gives a common basis for estimating costs and levelised cost of energy, and for road-mapping technology development.

When several parties want to connect to a radial distribution grid, deciding how to share the available capacity is a hard, non-convex optimisation problem. This preprint makes it convex, so it solves up to 88.3% faster and reaches a better optimum than a standard solver, which helps operators allocate capacity in congested grids.

Onshore wind projects often meet local resistance, and how developers involve residents shapes whether projects are accepted. This report finds that engagement practice varies widely among developers and argues for treating communities as collaborators, with engineers trained in the social impacts of wind energy.

Annotating video to train camera perception is expensive, which slows the development of scene understanding for automated driving. This method matches or beats the best published accuracy while training on images only. The link to the energy transition is indirect: cheaper perception development supports automated, shared electric mobility.

In a modular multilevel converter only some modules are active at any moment, yet all must end up with balanced capacitor voltages. This preprint gives a proven way to reach that balance despite the changing set of active modules. It is control theory; the link to chargers runs through the converter example.

New energy and mobility technologies must connect to each other and to the grid, and missing standards can slow their market introduction. Based on talks with NEON researchers and desk research, the report finds that product and safety standards mostly exist, while interoperability standards linking supply, grid, storage, vehicles and charging are still needed. It proposes energy transport, storage and electric mobility as focus areas for follow-up work.

Open, checkable data and code let others build on kite research without repeating expensive wind-tunnel and flight tests. With this record, researchers and kite developers can rerun every simulation of the dissertation, recreate its figures and validate their own aerodynamic models against the same measurements of the TU Delft V3 kite.

Whether neighbours accept kite power plants will influence where they can be built, and evidence from people living next to real test sites is still limited. This open data set lets other researchers check the published acceptance analyses and compare residents' views across sites and technologies.

Together with the released code, these data let others reproduce the figures of the fast kite-aerodynamics study and check its validation against wind-tunnel measurements. Kite designers and modellers can use the same inputs to test their own aerodynamic models.

Fast kite models need a common, open benchmark before designers can trust them for larger systems. With these data and the linked analysis code, researchers can regenerate the tables and figures of the wind-tunnel paper and validate their own aerodynamic models of soft-wing kites against measured forces and moments.

Sound is one of the local impacts that decide whether residents accept a new wind technology. This open dataset lets acoustic engineers and social scientists reuse the ratings to test their own models of how annoying kite sound is.

Measured flow fields around soft-wing kites are needed to check the simulations used to design kites for airborne wind energy. With this data set, others can reproduce the published flow analysis and use the measured flow fields to validate their own simulations.

Comparisons between a new and an established wind technology are rare because few people live near kite test sites. Publishing these survey data allows others to check the comparison and to build on it when more sites appear.

Comparing flight strategies for large kite systems needs a shared, open model rather than each developer's private code. With this version, researchers and developers can reproduce the circular versus figure-of-eight comparison, test their own flight and winch controllers on a 3 MW-class reference system, and compare power output and power quality on equal terms.

Fast, validated aerodynamic models shorten the design loop for soft kites, which otherwise relies on slow flow simulations and prototypes. With this code, designers and researchers can rerun the study's analyses, reproduce its comparison with wind-tunnel data and try the method on their own wing designs.

Claims about the cost of kite power are hard to compare when every developer uses its own model. With this framework, researchers, developers and energy-system modellers can reproduce the published scaling results, size kite systems under their own assumptions and feed consistent cost and power estimates into wider studies.

Kite systems of several megawatts do not exist yet, so researchers need a shared reference to study them. With this open model, others can reproduce the reference design study, simulate a 3 MW-class pumping kite system and test their own controllers, winches and flight paths against the same baseline, as later work on power smoothing and winch sizing did.

A shared cost model lets different kite power concepts be compared on the same economic terms. With this code, researchers and developers can compute costs and levelised cost of energy for their own designs, and couple the model to performance tools, as the AWE-SE design framework does.

Fast, open power curves are what energy-system modellers and kite developers need to judge where airborne wind energy could contribute. With this code they can reproduce the published results, compute power curves for their own system parameters, and link them to cost models or energy-system studies.

Planning the Dutch energy transition requires seeing how choices in heating, transport, industry and agriculture affect each other. This repository lets researchers run and adapt transition pathways to 2050 in a model that includes adoption dynamics, stakeholder behaviour and both local and national scales, with the assumptions documented in its wiki. It runs in the free AnyLogic Personal Learning Edition.

Milan Tamis defended his thesis on how EV drivers share public charging points in residential streets; promotors Floor Alkemade and Gerdien de Vries, copromotor Reint Jan Renes.

Nikos Damianakis defended his thesis on the grid impact of PV, EVs and heat pumps and on power control that turns them into grid flexibility.

Thesis on a multi-channel safety architecture for automated driving; the date is the publication date of the TU/e thesis record, not confirmed by a defence announcement.

Helena Schmidt defended her thesis on community acceptance of airborne wind energy at TU Delft; promotors Roland Schmehl and Gerdien de Vries. A recording of the ceremony is online.

Public defence of a thesis that extends activity-based travel demand models to multi-day scheduling and trip chains.

Sachin Yadav defended his thesis on voltage and power balancing in bipolar DC grids for ships.

Kaveh Pouresmaeil defended his thesis on isolated single-stage MMC-based conversion for megawatt charging from the medium-voltage grid.

Laura Kaschny defended her thesis on how EU energy law engages with energy justice; promotors Saskia Lavrijssen and Leonie Reins.

Rishikesh Joshi defended his thesis on design optimisation, market value and scaling of airborne wind energy systems.

Public defence (11:00) of a thesis on fast component models and optimization methods for electric and hybrid vehicle powertrains.

Sicheng Gong defended his thesis on how much medium-voltage EV charging Dutch grids can host and how hosting capacity regions help manage congestion.

Public defence (16:00) of a thesis on designing families of electric vehicles with shared powertrain modules and accounting for their life-cycle emissions.

Public defence (13:30) of the first WP4 NEON thesis, on optimization models for electric robotaxi fleets with ride-pooling.

Victor Reyes Dreke defended his thesis on hierarchical and distributed predictive control of modular multilevel converters.

Ygor Pereira Marca defended his thesis on a single-stage medium-voltage charger built on a direct ac/ac modular multilevel converter.

Public defence of Peter Hogeveen's thesis on agent-based modelling of the mobility transition; promotors Maarten Steinbuch and Geert Verbong.

Follow-up to a 4GU forum that uses a NEON collaboration on Mobility as a Service and energy justice as an example of a university learning architecture.

Essay that discusses NEON (around 40 PhDs, 20 partners) as the experiment in which he studied R&D management and institutional plasticity.

Essay on the Fourth Generation University that names NEON as the central case of his forthcoming 4GU book.

Autobiographical essay that describes NEON, led by Auke Hoekstra and Maarten Steinbuch, as a large-scale experiment in accelerating the energy transition.

Essay that presents NEON's crossover research and its agent-based model platform as an example of organising civic participation within research.

Roadmap essay describing how NEON turned his earlier NGU theory into practice, including the 'TRL train' alignment of NEON's work packages.

Thought experiment that projects NEON research onto a large festival as a pop-up city and demonstration case for the energy and mobility transition.

Blog post on a published critique of 100% renewable energy models and how the debate between modelling camps could move forward.

Essay on how technical universities could evolve, using NEON's virtual lab and its involvement of policymakers as an example.

Essay arguing that studies predicting copper shortages ignore substitution by aluminium, so copper demand is unlikely to hamper the transition to renewables.

Report on the first quarterly 'Q-celebration' (13 January 2023), where NEON PhDs held workshops on how to organise cross-disciplinary collaboration towards demo 3.

Blog post by Laura Kaschny and Leonie Reins arguing that the German Constitutional Court's ruling upholding a state law on citizen participation in wind farms implicitly supports the idea of sustainable energy democracy.

Essay building on Latour's 'Science in Action' to describe the postdoc research in NEON on techniques for accelerating the zero-emission transition through crossover programmes.

Explains NEON's governance: an 'agile science' cycle of quarterly sprints building to yearly demos, plans towards an integrated NEON model and the role of entrepreneurship and partners.

Essay on the 'Next Generation University', presenting NEON's crossover programme and scenario tools for policymakers as an example of the new university model.

Blog post arguing that climate communication should move from doomsday scenarios to concrete pathways for a fast transition.

Blog by Rudi Bekkers explaining why technical standards and interoperability matter for smart energy and mobility systems, and how WP8b will study them with the technical work packages.

Introductory blog in which Sofia Rosero Abad presents her background and her PhD on the role of standardisation in speeding up the energy transition.

Essay on building transition forecast models with agent-based modelling, introducing NEON and his role as point of contact for the partners.

Introductory blog in which Helena Schmidt presents her PhD on the social implications of airborne wind energy with industry partners Kitepower and Ampyx Power.