From the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 1750s until the 1880s, it took humanity 130 years to develop the technology and infrastructure needed to mass-generate and transmit energy using electricity.

It then took us another century to figure out that we are doing it wrong.

The oil crisis of the mid-1970s forced us to rethink the way we generate, distribute, and consume energy, but it wasn’t until the turn of the 21st century that the first serious attempts to deploy low-carbon energy technologies on a large scale.

Fast-forward to the present day, the modern power system features technologies, components and materials that did not exist outside the laboratory two decades ago, while it is being controlled using novel methods, including advanced control and artificial intelligence, made possible by the advent of high-speed telecommunications and the explosion of cheap computing power.

Countries are committing to shifting to a net-zero carbon energy system, with Scotland being one of the pioneers. But are these efforts enough to avert the oncoming climate crisis?

This talk will give an overview of the recent technological advances that enable the utilisation of low-carbon solutions and will highlight how our research helps pave the way for the transition towards a sustainable, citizen-centric, agile energy system.

Professor Kiprakis was born in Crete, Greece, where he completed his undergraduate studies in Electronics Engineering, at the Hellenic Mediterranean University. His interest in renewable energy brought him to the University of Edinburgh in 2000 for a PhD in Electrical Power Systems, which he followed up with postdoctoral research in marine renewables and smart grids in the School's Institute for Energy Systems.

Since 2011 he has been an academic at the School of Engineering, and in 2022 he was promoted to the Personal Chair of Agile Energy Systems.

Professor Kiprakis currently leads a group of 12 researchers working across the whole field of low carbon energy generation, distribution and use, while he teaches control engineering and solar energy at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Professor Aristides Kiprakis School of Engineering profile