Catherina Cader was born in Fulda in 1986.
She began her interdisciplinary studies in "Environmental and Resource management" after she spent some months on ecological farms in Australia, where she gained insights in ecological agricultural systems and improved on her English language proficiency. She successfully finished this study with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Justus-Liebig University in Gießen in 2010. She went on to do the Master in "Physical Geography: Systems, Interactions and Processes" at Philipps University Marburg, with the aim to gain a methodical understanding in the areas of system analysis and geographical information systems.
Within the program she spent a semester abroad at the Universit of Pécs in Hungary in autumn 2011.
After the exchange semester Catherina completed an internship at Reiner Lemoine Institut in Berlin in the area of renewable energy research. As a result she developed the question for her Master thesis:
"Night Light Imagery And Infrastructure Assessment: Calculating The Economic Potential Of Global Rural Electrification Based On Hybrid PV-Battery-Diesel Systems". With this work she finished her studies achieving the Master of Science degree with the award "excellent".Subsequently she was employed as researcher at the Reiner Lemoine Institut within the Off-grid team. This allowed her to continue her research in the area of off-grid energy supply and to present her results at conferences and discuss them with experts. Also Catherina published several papers as author and coauthor.
Renewable energy resources allow for various means of producing electricity. Besides traditional central electrification production schemes, and transmission and distribution grid development, more and more decentralized approaches are developed. In this case the electricity generation takes place in spatially distributed small plants. The technological progress of the renewable energy technologies provides extensive perspectives for decentralized and centralized electricity generation. However, the change towards higher shares of renewables requires new structures for generation, transmission and distribution of electricity.
Decentralized systems benefit from this development in particular, as renewable energies are spatially abundant in many regions of the world. The project focuses on small systems so as to evaluate their advantages.
The objective of the PhD thesis supervised at Justus-Liebig University Gießen is to define parameters that are from a geographical point of view decisive to find regions which profit from the development of decentralized renewable solutions. There still exist many regions with low access to electrification and lack of connections to electrical grids. Consequently the question arises, for which regions the development of independent renewable solutions is more profitable than a connection to existing grids. Advantages and disadvantages, as well as difficulties and barriers of implementation shall be analyzed in order to recommend a course of action for the respective regions. With the help of field trips these parameters are defined, validated and locally improved. These results then form the basis for the simulation of decentralized off-grid energy systems with renewable energies. The resulting optimized costs (levelized costs of electricity [LCOE]) are compared to the costs of the given electricity costs and the grid development costs for each region. This analysis enables location-based recommendations for the design of the optimal energy system in regions with insufficient electricity access.
