Prakhar Mehta

Prakhar joined the Bits to Energy Lab in Nuremberg as a PhD Student in February 2020. His main research interests lie in Urban Distributed Energy Systems (mainly Community Solar PV), Demand-side Flexibility from Electric Vehicles, Sustainability, Consumer Decision-making and the use of Agent-based Modelling techniques to explore how these topics interlink with technology, economics and society.

Prakhar holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sardar Patel College of Engineering in Mumbai, India and an M.Sc. in Energy Science and Technology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland. Before joining the Bits to Energy Lab, he gained research experience during his master thesis and then working as a research assistant at the Group for Sustainability and Technology at ETH Zurich. In this work, also ​co-supervised by the Chair of Architecture and Building Systems at ETH, he used Agent-​based Modelling to model the adoption of Solar Photovoltaics in Zurich with the current regulations in place, both on the individual and community scale, using high resolution solar potential and electricity demand data from City Energy Analyst models of Zurich’s Alt-​Wiedikon district.

In addition to his master’s degree, Prakhar is a graduate from EIT Climate-KIC‘s Master Label Programme, which focussed on real solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation through entrepreneurship. Prakhar also gained professional and international experience while working as an R&D Intern at ABB Switzerland‘s DC GIS group in Zurich and as an Intern at The Tata Power Company Limited‘s Transmission and Distribution department in Mumbai. In his free time, you can find him cooking and doing sports, or not find him at all since he loves to travel.

Teaching

• Designing Information Systems for Behaviour Change Seminar (DISBC) (SS 2022)
• Digital Transformation in the Energy and Mobility Sector (DITEM) (WS 2022/23)