Ten years in, the International Youth Conference on Energy (IYCE) still feels like a secret: a student-led meeting where posters have wires and the coffee breaks turn into lab tours. The 10th edition returned to Budapest, Aug 5–9, with undergrads through PhDs field-testing ideas in storage, power electronics, and grid optimization. It’s academic, sure—but also unapologetically applied.
What stood out (and why industry should care)
- Storage without buzzwords. We saw careful battery-management algorithms, second-life pack balancing, and thermal schemes tied to efficiency and cost curves, not vibes.
- Power electronics that print money. High-efficiency converters, grid-forming inverters, and HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) results that would not embarrass a factory floor review.
- Forecasting that respects the grid. ML meets market design: forecasts wired to tariffs, reserve products, and derating realities—because megawatts don’t move on Kaggle scores.
The quiet superpower: reproducibility
IYCE leans hard into open data and code links. For recruiters, that means a talent pool that can document, test, and ship. For founders, it’s a place to source interns who reduce converter losses on Monday and draft the preprint by Friday.
Dates/location: Aug 5–9, 2025, Budapest (Student Association of Energy).
