Jannis Langer wins Best ESS PhD Paper Award 2023

Every year, the ESS department selects its best PhD Paper. Jannis Langer is the winner of this award for 2023, with his paper “Geospatial analysis of Indonesia’s bankable utility-scale solar PV potential using elements of project finance.”

A jury assesses the nominated papers on five criteria (degree of innovation, scientific importance, practical importance, quality of design and methods, and significance of the findings). The jury unanimously selected Jannis’s paper as the best of all the nominated papers. They praised the author for developing an innovative method of solar resource assessment, giving significant new insight into PV potential in Indonesia. The jury also stated that this method could be replicated elsewhere, making it even more important scientifically.

Winning this award on May 27th was followed by a Cum Laude at his PhD defense on June 6th! So, a double congratulations to Jannis!

Paper abstract:

Geospatial analysis is useful for mapping the potential of renewables like solar PV. However, recent studies do not address PV’s bankable potential for which project financing can be secured. This paper proposes a framework that incorporates project finance into geospatial analyses to obtain the bankable potential of renewables. We demonstrate our framework for Indonesia, and compare the bankable potential with the socio-economic potential mostly used in literature.