In June 2023, I received the GDCh Prize from the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker for being the best chemistry graduate at my high school. A year later, I was coordinating grid connection processes for battery energy storage systems across Germany. The path between those two points was not straight.
Why not chemistry?
I liked chemistry because it made the invisible visible. You mix two clear liquids and something changes color, or temperature, or state. There's a directness to it. But I realized what I enjoyed wasn't chemistry itself — it was understanding systems. How things connect. How small changes propagate.
That's why Industrial Engineering felt right. It sits at the intersection of technical systems and business. You learn how things work and how to make them work better.
Landing at Terra One
I started at Terra One in May 2024, three months before my first semester at KIT. The company works on utility-scale battery energy storage — the massive battery systems that help stabilize the power grid as we move to renewable energy.
My job was to coordinate grid connection processes. In Germany, if you want to connect a large battery system to the grid, you need to navigate a maze of applications, grid operators, regulatory requirements, and technical specifications. I ended up processing over 100 GW of grid applications and received formal feedback on 28 GW.
The scale was hard to grasp at first. One gigawatt is roughly the output of a nuclear power plant. I was handling paperwork for a hundred of those.
What batteries taught me about building
Working in energy storage taught me a few things that apply far beyond the energy sector:
- Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks. Nobody thinks about the grid until the lights go out. The most important systems are the ones you don't notice.
- Regulation is a feature, not a bug. The grid connection process is slow and bureaucratic. It's also the reason the grid doesn't collapse. There's a reason the rules exist, even when they're frustrating.
- The energy transition is a coordination problem. We have the technology. What's hard is getting hundreds of grid operators, project developers, regulators, and landowners to work together. That's an industrial engineering problem, not a physics problem.
What's next
I'm now at Arteus Energy, still working on the BESS side but focused more on growth and project development. The energy transition needs people who can bridge the technical and the operational. That's where I want to be.
The GDCh Prize sits on a shelf somewhere in Friedberg. But the thread that runs from chemistry through systems thinking to energy storage — that's still the thread I'm following.