Lunch lecture: Synergizing land, water and energy resources in long-term energy planning for sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa

In this presentation, Edo will talk about some challenges and opportunities that arise in energy planning with land and water resource constraints, especially with transboundary basins and nascent regional power markets.  He will present two examples where we integrate land and water resources within energy planning through technologies such as pumped hydro storage and floating photovoltaics. He will discuss how the EPIC Africa project uses a CLEWs (Climate-Land-Energy-Water) framework to address issues of enhancing energy reliability, resilience to climate impacts, and the sustainability of energy pathways with examples of the Nile, Tana, and Volta basin countries. He will briefly discuss EPIC’s participatory transition management approach to embed citizens' values in the project partner countries. 

Dr. Edo Abraham is an Associate Professor of Water & Control Systems at the Water Management Department, TU Delft. His research is driven by global societal challenges related to water management for sustainable development and climate change strategies. Edo develops and applies novel integrated modelling, control, and optimization approaches to make integrated water-energy-food systems more efficient and resilient against uncertainties. Some of his research deals with model predictive control methods for optimizing water allocation and use in agricultural systems, planning networked water resources systems under uncertainty, optimizing water system operations for demand response, and optimizing nascent water-energy infrastructure in African water basins for transboundary cooperation. In his collaborative work, Edo endeavors to integrate sensitivity to values and is passionate about global development foregrounded inequitable access to resources and infrastructure, environmental sustainability, international solidarity, and social justice. 

Edo has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed journal publications on these subjects. He is also an Associate Editor for Energy Systems (Springer) and the Journal of Hydroinformatics (IWA). Edo holds a PhD in Control Engineering (Aeronautics) and a first-class honours MEng degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He received both degrees from Imperial College London, UK, in 2008 and 2013, respectively.