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Britta Buchholz

My name is Britta Buchholz. I am Hitachi ABB Power Grids’ Vice President for Active Distribution Grids in the agile Global Market Innovation team. In other words, I care for energy transition in distribution systems and work together with strategic customers on new solutions within the next 3 to 5-year horizon.

In 2011, I joined ABB´s Smart Grids Team. From 2014-2016, I led the Power Consulting Team in Germany and then became part of the Global Management Team for Grid Edge Solutions and Microgrids, after. There, we had to be very agile in moving market requirements and quickly developing new technologies. It is great to see the success of the team in providing resilient and green solutions to industry, remote villages, islands and distribution up to transmission systems around the world.

At present, with Hitachi ABB Power Grids, I focus on energy transition and together with strategic customers, co-create solutions for smarter, stronger and greener grids in industry and utilities.

Please share more about your industry expertise and work outside Hitachi ABB Power Grids.

For more than 20 years, I have been pushing for CO2 reductions by integrating renewable energy resources into the power systems. I took different perspectives—first was during my PhD from the power electronics and solar and wind generation side at Kassel University. After that, I joined the regional Multi Utility MVV Energie in Germany to trigger new businesses based on renewable energy, wherein I led the grid planning department for electricity, gas, heat and water. One key success was to have won a 20MEUR demonstration project called Model City Mannheim, where we implemented energy management solutions with intense prosumer interaction.

My expertise lies on providing different perspectives on energy transition. I have always worked at the interface between system operators, industry and research in order to identify the most important topics and create solutions that work. That also guided me to avoid ‘dead-end streets’ at very early stages and focus the energy of my teams on the right topics.

Among all interesting topics around energy transition, my passion are microgrids. It took a while since my PhD on microgrids in 2001, until they finally became ‘mainstream’ today. I think we will see much more decentralized generation and more microgrids with advanced control for resilient power systems with high shares of variable renewables in the future.

I was privileged to have had the chance to be recognized and promoted by global pioneers on energy transition. The supervisors of my doctoral thesis Juergen Schmid from Kassel University and Didier Mayer from Ecole des Mines de Paris encouraged me to contribute to the European Technology Platform Smart Grids. That network has helped me to understand perspectives of different players in the energy system early in my career. I am very grateful to Nikos Hatziargyriou from National Technical University of Athens for continuously guiding and challenging me to move forward and take over significant responsibility first in Europe and then in the global CIGRE organization.

Could you walk us through your CIGRE career and contributions?

As we talk about CIGRE here, looking back, I realized that in the past 15 years, I have had the chance to take over a nice series of roles, step by step.

Maybe this “CIGRE career” is an interesting example for other CIGRE colleagues.

I started as a member of several working groups – Development and Operation of Active Distribution Networks, then after that, it was in Capacity of Distribution Feeders for Hosting Distributed Energy Resources. Then I initiated and led the working group, Asset Management for Distribution Systems with High Shares of Renewable Energy. At the moment, I am leading the working group, Hybrid Systems for Off Grid Power Supply.

On the management side, I led the German Mirror Group of the Study Committee C6 Active Distribution Systems and Distributed Energy Resources and was the German representative to the Study Committee for six years. I was very proud to have received the Technical  Council Award in 2013. From 2014-2016, I chaired the Global Study Committee C6 and was a member of the Technical Council—the CIGRE Global Management Team that is responsible for the technical work.

Regarding conferences, after contributing to many papers and chairing various sessions in Symposia over the years, I was invited to give a talk in the CIGRE Opening Session 2012 in Paris on Distribution Systems with High Shares of Renewable Energy. In 2016, I chaired the Opening Session in Paris, where we translated energy transition into an interactive musical performance with the complete CIGRE Technical Council team.

This 2020, I had the role of “Special Reporter” for the Preferential Subject Enabling Technologies for Distribution Systems. For this year´s session, I evaluated abstracts and organized the session structure together with the study committee chair. Together with my team of moderators from Brazil, Japan, The Netherlands, and Denmark, we reviewed all pre-recorded video presentations and gave advice to presenters on quality improvements. In parallel, we also needed to familiarize ourselves with the CIGRE Academy platform. And finally, I also chaired the session on the preferential subject together with the moderators on 27th and 28th of August.

Further to that, I co-chaired a session on the CIGRE Technical Council and World Bank “Africa” Initiative, together with exceptional chair and panelists from ESKOM in South Africa, the World Bank and the Western African Power Pool last August 28, 2020.

What are your proud of and passionate about your work for CIGRE?

I am proud that we managed to facilitate the important knowledge exchange between distribution system operators, industry, and academia from all regions with very high-quality contributions. We must speed up energy transition, and in these few days of CIGRE Sessions, professionals have obtained important information on best practices. We strengthened the network, included young members into our strong expert´s community and learned from each other.

After having had the chance to be guided and trained by thought leaders in this network myself, I realized how important it is to interact with the next generation of engineers who are full of great ideas and highly skilled. In this friendly and constructive CIGRE community, everyone can develop their expertise, get guidance from seniors, and experiment with new roles and tasks.

If we want to meet the Paris targets and mitigate climate change, we need the fresh and diverse ideas from young engineers, and it is great to contribute to encouraging and empowering them to shape their future.

 

Britta Buchholz holds a Doctor´s degree in Electrical Engineering with focus on renewable energy from Kassel University, Germany, and a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.

From 2007 to 2013, she lectured at Federal Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.