Dr. Philipp Blechinger is an international expert in renewable energy and rural electrification. He holds a PhD in engineering from the TU Berlin. During his studies, he gained first working experiences in 2007 – 2008, working with consultancies in the field of renewable energy supply. He continued working as researcher at TU Berlin in the field of renewable energy and power generation.
In 2011, he joined the RLI and focused on the analysis of island energy systems for his PhD project “Barriers for implementing renewable energies on Caribbean islands”. Additionally, he started to develop the off-grid systems research group, which he is currently representing as team leader.
He managed and conducted a wide range of international projects on energy access and island energy supply. Examples include the rural electrification planning for Nigeria and the support to the Department of Energy of the Philippines to improve electrification efforts. He also evaluated the economic potential of renewable energy within island systems for companies like Siemens and ABB. He has developed and lead several large-scale research projects such as E-Land (EU-H2020), PeopleSuN (GER – BMBF) and open_plan (GER – BMWKi). Philipp regularly publishes and shares research results at conferences and in scientific journals (>70), also acting as reviewer and co-editor. In 2019 Philipp was appointed Visiting Scholar in the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) of the University of California, Berkeley as part of the C-BEAR+ project and a selected member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
He is also leading the RLS-graduate school on “EnergySystemTransition” with currently 6 PhD students working on solutions for the German energy transition. These include flexibilization, decentral storage systems, sustainable mobility and social factors.
His fieldwork includes research in many Caribbean countries of as well as projects in the Cook Islands, the Philippines, Thailand, Tanzania, Zambia and Nigeria.