ISUW 2023 Speaker

Laurent Schmitt is the Head of Utilities & European Developments at dcbel and the President at Digital4Grids, based in the Greater Paris Metropolitan Region. He is passionate about smart grids, renewable integration, and digital technologies as enablers of climate change mitigation in modern societies. He has essential skills and values, including leadership, program and risk management, facilitation, result orientation, integrity, and courage, to efficiently cover general management roles in these domains. Previously, he worked as the General Secretary of ENTSO-E, the association of European Transmission System Operators, where he headed the ENTSO-E staff team to support and advise the European Commission and ACER on strategic mandates to enable the European energy transition towards #Netzero targets by 2050. He also spent 18 years at Alstom, where he worked his way up from Alstom Hydro and Thermal Plant Controls in North America to become Vice President for Smart Grid Solutions. Laurent Schmitt is a member of several strategic industry committees working on smart grids and contributes to a number of expert advisory task forces to the European Commission on the topics of generation, grid, and storage applications. He has also published on large-scale virtual power plants, integration into distribution grids, directions for future smart grids standardization, new energy management architectures for wind farms, and the use of new Internet of Object technologies in the smart grid/smart city space. Schmitt holds an INSEAD-Alstom Advanced Management Seminar and a degree in engineering from CentraleSupélec.