In March, Doctoral Research Liang Kong attended the World Sustainable Energy Days 2025 (WSED) event in Austria, as a young energy efficiency researcher.
Liang is an Energy Institute member, a Grantham Scholar of The Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, a PhD researcher at South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre, and is based in the Management School. Her research interests include supply chain resilience, complex adaptive systems, system dynamics, and circular economy.
Liang presented her work titled, 'Maturity Evaluation for the Hydrogen Industry: Framework and Meta-Model' as part of the Young Energy Researchers conference, a leading annual event on energy transition and climate neutrality that presents the work and achievements of young researchers in the fields of energy efficiency and biomass.
The event, held on Tuesday 4 March, brought together over 650 participants from more than 60 countries, offering an invaluable opportunity for peer networking with researchers and industry experts from across the globe.
Overlapping indicators and inconsistent standards complicate industry assessments in the hydrogen sector. The lack of a comprehensive framework specific to the hydrogen sector further hinders industry evaluation, transparency, and benchmarking.
Liang’s research addresses this gap by developing a metamodel (a model of a model, or a set of rules that define how a model should be created) that establishes a standardised framework to streamline industry evaluations and unify assessment standards.
Although metamodels are used widely across different fields, no metamodel has been specifically designed for assessing the hydrogen industry. This metamodel addresses the limitations of single-focus assessments by integrating multiple evaluation methods into a unified framework, facilitating software and database development for the hydrogen sector.
Reflecting on her experience at the Young Energy Researchers Conference, Liang said: "It was inspiring to engage with global experts at WSED, learn about cutting-edge renewable energy research, and explore how benchmarking and standardised indicators can drive the development of the renewable energy industry. I am pleased that my work contributes to this crucial dialogue."
Liang’s work supports the continuous improvement of evaluation methods and lays the foundation for a software platform to assess industry maturity. In the long term, it can evolve into a large language model repository and a comprehensive industry evaluation framework.
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