ABOUT

An engineer who tests it in the field

I'm an electrical engineer by trade, and also a systems thinker, business developer, community builder and traveller, based in the Netherlands. My work sits at the overlap the name Common Ground is actually pointing at: the negotiated ground between an engineer's design, a community's needs, an NGO's mandate, and the land the infrastructure sits on. The Common Ground Project develops sustainable energy and community projects. I design resilient power systems around their local context, help projects work out a business model that holds up in practice, and run the project side of it. The expeditions, tools and Field Notes on this site are how we tell the story, test the thinking and build the network.

Why the field

Most of what I know about energy systems, I learned by being wrong about them somewhere remote first. Expeditions and fieldwork across West Africa, and eventually further afield, are how I keep the models honest.

What I bring

Four things I try to hold together at once: the technical depth to design a system that fits its place (BESS design, energy system optimisation), the business sense to make a project pay its own way (business development, business models tested in practice), the field experience to know whether it will survive contact with a real place, and a stubborn focus on livelihoods over kilowatt-hours delivered.