New correspondent: Deniz Kalkan from Ulm University, Germany

Today our team was joined by a new correspondent from Germany. His name is Deniz Kalkan, studying at the University of Ulm. As a student and as our team-member he’s very much motivated to be involved in improving energy solutions. He helps to unroll our video platform. This means: help us find suitable subjects to be featured in his country. We first asked him to answer some questions.

Deniz, can you introduce yourself?

I am Deniz, originally from Istanbul/Turkey, 25 years old master student at the University of Ulm. Currently, I am working on my master thesis at Zentrum für Sonnenenergie und Wasserstoff-Forschung (ZSW) on the topic of Li-Oxygen Batteries. I really like being involved with a fundamental research but I also like following energy news, improvements and new applications.

What motivated you to choose for this study?

Being conscious of environmental issues and effects of energy on the conditions motivated me to study on green energy technologies. For instance, in my country, we don’t have great resources that can be produced efficiently enough energy with current technology, that’s why we are mostly foreign-dependent for meeting our energy need. Although we have a very good potential of renewable resources like solar, wind etc., hydroelectric power and nuclear plants are built, excavation works to find new sources are run to compensate energy gap by harming nature, unfortunately. Somehow, we can generalize this situation for other countries, but the solution can be found at all hand.

What are your ambitions? How would you like to develop your future career?

I am a student and an engineer who has been always conscious of the significance of sustainable technologies, I would like to build my career to pursue a real solution for the world’s energy problem, by researching and developing the technology behind it.

Do you see any consequences from climate change in your region? If yes, can you give an example?

Last time, while I was visiting my hometown, a strong hail was just started out of nowhere in maybe 10 minutes. It was a sunny summer but then the blue sky became black and it started to hail, I have never experienced it before. Recently, we started to see this kind of storms more often, unfortunately.

What do you consider is a strong quality of the Cool Down The Planet formula? 

In my opinion, with today’s technology, it is possible to gather right people at a right place for a good reason and the Cool Down The Planet has this power in itself. People are the strong quality of the Cool Down The Planet and they make it a promising tool.