Catarina Rebelo da Silva, a Técnico alumna, has won the latest edition of the E-Redes Open Data Academy Challenge Award for her dissertation completed as part of the Master’s Programme in Engineering and Management of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, which utilised the E-REDES Open Data Portal to foster innovation in the energy transition.

Catarina Rebelo da Silva’s thesis, “Drivers of Self-Consumption and Electric Mobility in Portuguese Municipalities: Econometric and Machine Learning Insights”, supervised by Inês Carrilho Nunes, assessed “the factors explaining self-consumption and electric mobility in Portugal at the municipal level”, according to E-REDES.

The availability of open-access data, which the alumna believes to be “a strategic asset for the country”, was fundamental to her research. “I have no doubt that this ‘productisation’ of data is fundamental to the future of the country and the energy transition, both in project planning and in the design of public policies”, she said.

Speaking about the Open Data Academy Challenge, Catarina Rebelo da Silva says that it enables “students from a range of disciplines to innovate in how data can contribute to the country’s energy transition”.