Founded in Paris in 1931, CIGRÉ is a global network consisting of 60 National Committees in 90+ countries, and is dedicated to sharing and cultivating power system expertise.
The Scientific Award (“Elkraftprisen”) was created by the Norwegian National Committee in 1990 as a means of highlighting Norwegian expertise in the power sector. Recipients are chosen every year based on the high quality of their work, either theoretical or practical, within the Committee’s fields of interest.
The award ceremony took place at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters’ house in Oslo.
“I must thank the Committee for this award. It is of course a great honour, and at the same time an incentive to continue my work in this field,” said Bjørn.
Bjørn became involved with CIGRÉ when he joined SINTEF Energi Research as a research scientist in 1994. In 2012, he became a chief scientist in the Energy Systems department, and won SINTEF’s Award for Outstanding Research Excellence in 2014.
While Bjørn has been involved in numerous interesting projects during his time at SINTEF, one of his favourites was “Electromagnetic transients in future power systems”, which was concerned with modelling electrical power components for use in simulation of power system electromagnetic transients.
“It was an incredibly useful project and we achieved a lot,” Bjørn said. “It was also a very international project, and a lot came out of that.”
International collaboration has been an important focus area for Bjørn. As a member of CIGRÉ, he has led the Joint Working Group (JWG) A2/C4.52 “High-frequency transformer and reactor models for network studies” (2012-2021), and he is the Norwegian representative in Study Committee C4 – Power System Technical Performance.
He has also undertaken two research stays abroad: at the University of Toronto in Canada in 1996 and at the University of Stuttgart in Germany in 2001. According to Bjørn, these stays were “crucial” for his career at SINTEF, as they enabled him to work with and benefit from expertise and technology that he would not otherwise have had access to.
“Freedom,” as he puts it.
So far, Bjørn has authored over 140 articles published in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and he has been cited over 10,000 times. In 2021, he ranked highly on Stanford University’s annual list of the 2% most published researchers in the world.
Bjørn also takes an active role in passing his expertise on to the next generation, and in 2022, he became a professor II in the Department of Electrical Power Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
“In many ways, research is like top-level athletics. In order to succeed, you need a tremendous amount of effort and dedication,” said John Olav Tande, chief scientist at SINTEF Energy Research. “Bjørn has, without a doubt, put a lot of work and dedication in to his research, but he has also succeeded a lot.”
Congratulations to Bjørn on receiving this well-deserved recognition of his work! We look forward to seeing what comes next.
