DTU researcher on the EU climate council: Climate action should also be big business

Her work on developing sustainable solutions that can make wind energy the foundation of tomorrow’s energy system resulted in a seat on EU’s new climate council for her this year, where she advises top politicians on global decisions for renewable energy. At the same time, her research is concerned with involving the people so that major energy decisions are not simply decided by top leaders but give everyone a reason to fight for the climate.

Meet DTU researcher Lena Kitzing, who believes that climate action can be both beetroot burgers and big business.

EU calling

It takes two calls before the EU climate council’s Head of Secretariat gets hold of Lena Kitzing.

Kitzing makes sure to be 100 per cent present in everything she does. Like her research, her life has to be sustainable, she says, so that any disturbances do not affect the quality and presence when meeting with other people. That principle spares today’s departmental meeting of a message that would have taken all the focus.

The Head of Secretariat calls to tell Lena Kitzing that she, as one of 15 international experts, has been selected for the independent EU climate council, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change. In this position, she will advise EU politicians on climate decisions for a four-year period.

“I was really excited by the news and immediately shared it with my colleagues. It’s a great opportunity to make an impact, and that’s actually one of the reasons why I do research. Because the knowledge we generate makes a difference. This platform almost guarantees that the politicians will listen. So it’s a great honour to be able to take part,” says Lena Kitzing.

Since graduating from Europa-Universität in Flensburg in 2006 with a degree in Energy and Environmental Management, she has taken every opportunity that presented itself. This brought her from Germany to Denmark and from a management position in the business sector to a research position at DTU.

Her career path has taken many turns, but a the centre of it was always a fundamental desire to understand how renewable energy, energy systems, and political decisions are connected.Thus, she did not hesitate when the EU climate council announced that they were looking for leading climate experts back in October 2021.

Experts who could use their knowledge and insight to help politicians make the right decisions, enabling the EU to reach its binding climate goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

Lena Kitzing wrote to them:

With the support of presidents from six of the leading technical universities in Europe, including DTU, Lena Kitzing submitted her application.

Headwind

The first time Lena Kitzing learned that it is possible to harness energy generated by the wind to make green power was in 1997 when she was in 10th grade in Darmstadt, Germany. She learned this in a physics lesson on renewable energy and, like a magnet, she was completely drawn to this new knowledge.

In addition to doing her homework and living her teenage life, Lena Kitzing followed the political debate closely. At the time, it was not climate change that kept young people up at night, but the debate about nuclear power, and the fact that there was an alternative, sustainable energy source right outside her window was a true eye-opener for Kitzing.

“I became very interested in what energy really was, and I was also very interested in politics. So when I started university in Flensburg, I read everything I could about wind energy, energy systems, energy technologies, and energy policy,” says Lena Kitzing. Her thirst for knowledge was driven by a desire to solve a problem rather than by an idealistic dream.

“Of course I was interested in climate science and the results that were showing us that we had to do something. But the driving force was first and foremost a desire to understand and investigate energy systems and gain more knowledge that would make it work. I think I’ve always had a scientific mind,” she says.

However, the business sector was not ready to invest in renewable energy on a large scale, and in the social science research field, applicable science was not nearly as prestigious as the broader research areas like economics. Lena was looking for a community that shared her passion for ‘alternative’ energy sources, and she started attending renewable energy conferences. Here, she met a different network that helped expand her horizon.

“At the first wind energy conferences I attended, people wore knitwear and Jesus sandals. It was very small and hippie-like. I remember attending an event in Berlin where I met the Dane Preben Maegaard, who was the head of Nordic Folkecenter for Renewable Energy. He was incredibly kind and told me so much about the wind energy work that was being done in Denmark. That’s when I realized that wind energy was a bit bigger in Denmark,” Lena Kitzing recalls.

She was certain that the wind pioneers held part of the solution to the major energy challenges of the future. However, the rest of the world did not seem interested. In Germany, a few large energy companies dominated the market with a system based almost entirely on fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas. In the media, the debate was no longer about energy policy. And after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, EU politicians prioritized the terrorist threat over energy solutions and climate change.

It was around this time that Lena Kitzing finished her studies and decided to take on her first job at the German energy company RWE. If the energy industry was to radically change, she needed to understand what was going on in the industry engine room.

Turning point

“It was one of the largest energy companies in Germany with 70,000 employees. They had power, gas, electricity customers, cables, grids, coal power plants, nuclear power plants, coal mines. They had it all.”

That is how Lena remembers her former workplace RWE. Big, powerful, and rich. But there was one market that RWE did not own and which was almost incompatible with the image that the company had established through generations: renewable energy.

When Lena Kitzing was tasked with forming the first renewable energy business unit in RWE’s history as part of an international graduate program, the reaction from the older colleagues in the company was as expected:

“They said: ‘What? We don’t do anything less than 5 MW. That’s small business, we don’t bother with that! We only do big business!’,” says Lena Kitzing, who helped create the new unit despite the internal resistance.

“We gained momentum, and I could tell that it really changed the mindset of the big, old conservative energy companies. They could see that now even RWE was getting into this business.”

Some time later, Kitzing landed a job at Danish energy giant Dong, which operated with 85 per cent black energy and 15 per cent green energy in 2008. The then CEO Anders Eldrup wanted to turn those numbers upside down with 85 per cent green energy instead, and Lena Kitzing helped make that vision come true.

As an employee in a Corporate Finance management position, she prepared some of the company’s biggest investment decisions in green offshore wind projects, and today the oil and gas company DONG Energy has been reborn as offshore wind specialist Ørsted. At the same time, RWE has also become a major player in wind power and is currently responsible for the construction of Denmark’s largest offshore wind farm in the North Sea, Thor Wind Farm.

Her years in the energy business made Kitzing want to gain a deeper understanding of the connection between incentives and investment decisions, and especially how to make use of this knowledge for the energy transition. She therefore did a PhD project at DTU, where the goal was to investigate how to regulate the market towards a green transition through various political strategies.

Today, she is Associate Professor and Head of the interdisciplinary research department Society, Market and Policy at DTU Wind and Energy Systems in Risø. The department consists of geographers, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists who work together to find the best possible solutions to ensure that the implementation of wind energy in the energy system is sustainable for both the climate, people, and society.

The research is goal-oriented, which means that the researchers set a clear goal from the start and one that can bring together stakeholders in the form of government agencies, corporates, universities, and society. The goal-oriented research is in direct line with extensive strategy work carried out by the European Commission, resulting in the publication of the so-called Lemý report in 2018, which recommended for research in the EU to be more goal-oriented in the future.

The centre of power

Lena Kitzing never had a dedicated strategy for how to achieve influence. Nevertheless, her career has elegantly followed the rapid development of wind energy over the past 20 years. From grassroots movement to big business. From university student to EU climate expert.

“I believe that when you do something that you love, with passion and curiosity, doors will open for you. That’s my experience. My path is not the most straight forward. But I’ve always done what really interested me, and I think that’s what led me to where I am now.”

Lena Kitzing remembers talking to a group of peers about ‘the old wind industry’ a few years ago. They asked themselves where all the pioneers had gone, and this made her reflect on the colossal development the wind industry has undergone in a short period of time.

“Today, it’s mostly about money,” she says, but she does not consider that a bad thing. Because according to Lena Kitzing, the battle to save the climate should be fought at all levels. She believes that private individuals as well as big businesses should contribute as much as they possibly can.

“Commercial interest is necessary if renewable energy is to take over the entire energy market. We need billions in investments, most of which must come from private businesses. But with the new role comes new responsibility. It’s important to ensure that the transition takes place in a cost-effective and fair way. And it’s also important to involve citizens right from the start, for example when constructing new wind farms. Working towards net-zero emissions needs to become part of our new image as a society, which is why we can only solve this task in unity. This is one of the aspects that we deal with in our research,” she says.

The best example of how far wind energy has come is probably the meeting of political leaders that will take place in Denmark in august 2022. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has invited prominent Northern European and Baltic heads of state to discuss the expansion of Energy Island Bornholm from 2 GW offshore wind energy to 3 GW. The political goal is to make wind energy the foundation of the European green energy system of the future.

“The upcoming summit on Energy Island Bornholm and the summit in Esbjerg earlier this year, where EU leaders signed a historic agreement to establish 150 GW of offshore wind in the North Sea, are a big deal, because it has taken a long time to create awareness of climate change in people and to make it a political priority. The cooperation between European countries on the development of offshore wind farms and energy islands is a good, concrete example of how the EU’s binding climate goals can be achieved. So now we can start taking action,” says Lena Kitzing.

She has been elected to serve on the EU climate council for a four-year period with the possibility of re-election, and her work with providing scientific advice to EU politicians on renewable energy has already begun. The time when wind turbines were a niche is definitely over.