A successful case of Networking

The collaboration between SELECT and EPPEI

Living the Innoenergy experience means that soon or later, you must face "networking". This word will be told you with the solemn tone of a religious commandment, with the gravity of a fundamental law. The principle states that every situation is good for introducing yourself, for connecting with other people and catching opportunities. Even though it may be perceived as an unnatural effort in the beginning, it is the perfect approach to tackle the big challenges in front of us.  

I understood this more clearly recently, having had the opportunity to collaborate for a project, with a South African university, together with my group mates from SELECT. 

Meeting at North West University, one of the partner institutes of EPPEI, with Prof Stuart Piketh

Everything started during the SELECT Spring Seminar, last May in Eindhoven. One of the presentations was held by Prof. Louis Jestin, the creator and director of Eskom Power Plant Engineering Institute (EPPEI). One step back: Eskom is the main electricity public utility of South Africa. Within this company, five years ago, EPPEI was launched, a master program that connects the 8 most important technical universities of the country, with the purpose of creating skilled power engineers that will solve, in a medium-term perspective, the challenges of the national electrical infrastructure: grid robustness, environmental impact, asset renovation, start-up of renewables and many others. Does this sound familiar to you? 


Innoenergy and EPPEI happen to be very similar in the trust put in education, but they are somehow complementary in the means to achieve the objective: while we constantly look for the “game changing” idea (our second holy commandment), our South African friends are focused on the creation of dexterous engineers, masters of power plants, and reliable choice makers. The match between the two entities comes natural, and this is why Louis Jestin was giving a very animated presentation in Eindhoven last May, foreseeing the chance of a fruitful collaboration.
The group (almost) complete at NWU

Thanks to Davide Liviero’s incredible networking skills (he will kill me for this), we got in contact with Louis and we decided to get involved in one of the Eskom-EPPEI projects, that became our “integrated Project of the Year” (one of the curricular courses of SELECT). We focused on the Eskom offset plan, that aims to improve standards of living in the poorest settlements of the country, while reducing air pollution, mainly due to domestic coal burning. But I will not spoil any further. In the next post I will reveal more about this project, for which I have a particular enthusiasm. I would just like to thank Innoenergy for funding the flights of our trip to South Africa, and EPPEI professors, staff and students of course, for being so welcoming towards us. Because it was not only about the knowledge we got, but also about the inspiring people we met: professionals with a vision of the goal and a clear idea of the ways to reach it.

Two SELECT students remained in South Africa and they are already writing their thesis in Stellenbosch in this moment. We hope that this collaboration will be fueled by new projects and new exchanges soon, and to see South African students next year, sitting in KTH or UPC classes. Because we believe in the value of networking. We called it community, it echoed ubuntu.

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Innoenergy Master School

This is a blog for the students of InnoEnergy Master's School.