In February 2014 Professor Green became the director of the Energy Futures Lab. In this, his inaugural, lecture Professor Green talks about why smart energy systems will need to be formed by the smart combination of psychology, data analytics, markets design, generation technologies, consumer products, industry processes, energy storage and business service innovation.

He has particular admiration for the great engineers and scientists of the nineteenth century who were driven by a belief that through understanding the natural world, they could help society and commerce advance. They had no notion of boundaries around their disciplines and studied wherever need or curiosity drew them; and they also found beauty in form and function coming together.

Now in the twenty first century, with our highly refined areas of study, we need to make conscious efforts to work between, and across, the disciplines we have defined. That is precisely what is called for if we are going to make a success of our ambitions to power the world with low-carbon energy.

Many of the individual parts of the energy jigsaw, in my case creating sub-sea international electricity grids, draw on a number of engineering disciplines, but the really big challenge is making our energy systems smart enough to match where and when we want to consume to where and when the necessary low-carbon energy can be sourced.

Professor Green is also a Professor of Electrical Power Engineering at Imperial College London and the Deputy Head of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department.

Tim Green received a B.Sc. (Eng) (first class honours) from Imperial College London, UK in 1986 and a Ph.D. from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK in 1990. Both degrees were in electrical engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer in the UK. He was a Lecturer at Heriot Watt University until 1994.

His research interest is in formulating the future form the electricity network to support low-carbon futures. A particular theme is how the flexibility of power electronics and control can be used to accommodate new generation patterns and new forms of load, such as EV charging, as part of the emerging smart grid. He has particular interests in offshore DC networks and of management of low voltage networks. He leads the HubNet consortium of 8 UK universities coordinating research in low-carbon energy networks and is the Network Champion for the Research Councils UK.

This talk was recorded on 28 October 2014.

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