Minister Letschert Visits UTOPYS at National Roadmap Ceremony

Minister Rianne Letschert of Education, Culture and Science opened the ceremony of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Infrastructure with a visit to UTOPYS. In the ESP Lab at TU Delft she was shown the virtual models of the future energy system that the programme is built around, before the eleven honoured Roadmap consortia were celebrated later that day.

Solar panels on roofs and wind farms at sea are a familiar sight, the minister noted afterwards, but they also raise a new question: how to keep the grid in order. Researchers working with a simulator of this kind, she said, can make "a crucial contribution to our energy security and strategic independence", and she closed by calling the eleven projects "pioneering research that moves the Netherlands forward".

Marcel Levi, chair of the NWO board, put the case for the instrument itself: "Real progress depends on these very large projects." Facilities on this scale are built in one place, coordinated nationally and often internationally, and stay open to the whole research community. NWO awarded 197 million euro across the eleven projects at the end of 2025; with co-financing from the consortia, the total investment comes to 301 million euro.

UTOPYS received 16.5 million euro through the LSRI programme and ranked first among all proposals submitted. Led by Prof. Peter Palensky (Delft University of Technology), the ten-year programme brings together eight Dutch knowledge institutions and SURF to build a state-of-the-art real-time power system simulator, and with it a new theory of large, complex power systems.