Biography

Dr. ir. Kenneth Bruninx is an assistant professor at TU Delft's Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management in the Section Energy & Industry and a research fellow at the Faculty of Engineering of KU Leuven. His research focusses on the energy transition and industrial decarbonization, using a variety of techniques from engineering, optimization, game theory and operations research.

Before his appointment at TU Delft, K. Bruninx was with KU Leuven and EnergyVille (Belgium), where he was a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Flemish Institute For Technological Research (VITO). He holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (2016), a MSc in Management (2015) and a MSc in Energy Engineering (2011), all from KU Leuven.

Publications

For the latest overview of K. Bruninx’s publications, please visit his personal website: www.kennethbruninx.com/publications  

Expertise

Together with my team, I focus analysing and developing (energy) policies and markets in the context of industrial decarbonization and the deployment of carbon-neutral hydrogen. Although hydrogen provides a technologically feasible decarbonization route for many hard-to-abate emissions, the question when, how much and in which sectors one should use carbon-neutral hydrogen to ensure a cost-efficient energy transition is still unanswered.

To support these efforts, our research focusses on two complementary fronts. First, we develop operational and investment models for integrated energy systems, capturing required temporal, spatial and sectoral detail, as well as the technical characteristics of different energy vectors. Second, embedding existing and novel market structures in long-term equilibrium problems, reflecting real-life decision making, allows complementing the normative views from their optimization-based counterparts. In both research tracks, we aim to improve the ability of such models to capture real-life dynamics via data-driven approaches.

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