Beebop Values

Crafting Teams and Technology: Empowering Virtual Power Plants

In the last 14 years, I have been spending an important part of my time crafting teams, technology and algorithms that bring energy-constrained flexibility to our energy system through virtual power plants. In the coming weeks and months I plan to discuss more about how Beebop’s hybrid algorithms will truly bring scale to Virtual Power Plants. Here however, I want to focus on something quite different but quintessential to deliver high quality flexibility products: team values.

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Navigating the Terrain: The Essence of Team Values

Building virtual power plants is a challenge that requires a balanced team with a set of shared core values. One needs dreamers, opportunity seekers and team players that see a solution for each problem. This needs to be balanced by pragmatists and team members that see a problem in each solution, in my experience once you find a harmony between these treats can you really deliver on innovation. This harmony however can only thrive if the team can have open, direct and respectful conversations on ideas and solutions, play the ball, not the person, this brings me to integrity, a first core value.

Balancing Dreamers and Pragmatists: The Key to Innovation

A Virtual Power Plant exists and operates in our energy system, and our energy system is arguably one of the most complex engineering feats of mankind. This complexity projects itself on the diversity of stakeholders: energy consumers, transmission system operators, distribution system operators, retailers, device manufacturers, market operators,… All have different (and often conflicting) interests and roles to play. Furthermore a consumer can cast a vote and hence once you dwell into the area of decentralized flexibility and have an impact on the energy bill of consumers, politics becomes part of the game. Innovating in this web of stakeholders creates ripples which lead to inertia, pushbacks and opportunities. It is a tough market to work in. Managing this complexity means that the team requires diverse talent that thrives in such a tough environment, and does not take no for an answer while remaining diplomatic. Integrity and energy system knowledge are key but equally important is the ability to shift gears when the road becomes peculiar and steep, which brings us to tenacity, another of our core values.

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Integrity in Action: Fostering Respectful Collaboration

Forging “practical” decision algorithms to operate over 1e6 energy-constrained assets in real time under uncertainty, embedded in our physical energy system and integrated in flexibility and energy markets is a fun little problem on which hundreds if not thousands of papers have been written. Many papers (including some of my own work) have been sacrificed on the altar of academic fetishes such as mathematical bombast or superficial AI hype opportunism. Equally so, the blanket of pragmatism has suffocated many elegant and truly scalable solutions by adhering to the infamous 20-80 rule (more 5-60 in practice). At Beebop, we have the vision of building deeply practical demand response technology that can handle massive scale, with the understanding that we need both pragmatic and truly disruptive algorithms.

Complexity in Focus: Managing Stakeholder Diversity

As a consequence, we are building a team with algorithmic dreamers, researchers, practitioners, pragmatists and builders seeking to explore and build VPP technology with the right complexity at the right place*. We hereby combine techniques from operations research such as model-based (based upon physical principles) optimization next to data-driven approaches such as reinforcement learning and structured neural network architectures, but equally so we pragmatically embed rule-based controllers and decision trees or algorithms that learn to interact with consumers. Building such architecture requires a team with an unrelenting drive to deliver quality, on time, never losing track of our vision and impact. This brings me to professional excellence, another core value.

Tenacity: Fueling Progress in a Challenging Environment

When I got the opportunity to join beebop.ai earlier this year, I saw an opportunity to build a balanced team together with Evelyn Heylen , Julien Leprince , Olivier Deckers , Sandra Trittin and Jan-Willem Rombouts , sharing these core values. I saw an opportunity to do what gives me meaning, an opportunity to contribute to real decarbonisation of society (not just on paper), a key challenge for this and next generations. And here I am. I know where the journey starts, not where it will lead but if you are still reading this, you might be intrigued and maybe you know someone (including yourself) that shares some of the values above and is willing to work with us on building VPP*. If so, send us a mail: beebop@beebop.ai .

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