Research & Portfolio

Isaac Berger (mostly known as Zac)

98 Loopland Park, Belfast
BT6 9DZ

zacberger11@gmail.com

Professional Work

Network Topology Optimisation – Analysis of a New and Innovative Simulation Technology within Power Transmission. [→]

An NTO solution is a mathematical solver that locates the best candidate topologies for improving overall power flows in a transmission network. Objectives vary, but in Europe have centred around reducing thermal congestion and voltage violations. NESO commissioned EY to lead a piece of discovery work to assess the state-of-the-art amongst academia, vendors and operators, and generate conclusions for GB’s future strategy. As a lightweight full-time team, we contributed a novel definition of NTO as a nine-step process, identifying factors that must be paired, prioritised, and bear out computational trade-offs.

Read more GB’s ambitious net zero targets have reshaped the grid. In 2025, clean energy accounted for 56% of GB’s electricity. Renewables such as wind are inherently variable, substantially increasing the frequency of over-generation. GB’s demand is forecast to double by 2050, due to the rise in electrified heating and transport, and AI-powering data centres. Structural reinforcements and new capital projects that increase grid capacity are not only costly but also involve decade-long planning challenges. For GB specifically, generation is concentrated in the North and demand is concentrated in the South; a corridor of transmission bottlenecks. At the confluence of these factors is increasing pressure on infrastructure.

A core responsibility of NESO is ensuring GB’s grid is always operating within feasible limits, through routine processes and real-time interventions carried out by the Electricity National Control Centre (ENCC). There are further planning teams for medium to long-term coordination. Together, NESO ensures that the network points that introduce and consume electricity, and available grid equipment are used in harmony day-by-day, for safe and efficient operation.

In GB’s green grid, unforeseen weather causes imbalances to materialise in the day-ahead, which the ENCC must remedy. Within this timeframe, ENCC has a variety of data-driven levers at its disposal, intervening to balance supply to consumers and prevent grid infrastructure from being dangerously overloaded with electricity. The key historic lever has been controlling the amount of new electricity injected into the network. ENCC operators use reserves and storage and, more significantly, the Balancing Mechanism—a 24h digital auction—to pay scheduled generators to adjust their output. Maintaining feasible limits in this way now incurs billions yearly. A second more complex but cost-effective lever is Network Topology Optimisation (NTO). The immense computational challenge of NTO, and the strategies that have been developed to manage this burden, are explored in this report.



Academic Work

Below are works I completed during my International Relations BSc at the London School of Economics (2020-2023). The topic of the Change Makers research was an original proposal which the university chose to fund.

Undergraduate Dissertation – International Tax Avoidance and National Public Concern: A Novel Force within the OECD Project on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. [→], Data [→]

My thesis offers a twofold contribution to tax avoidance studies. Firstly, public salience is interwoven into the mainstream account of avoidance that prioritises the interaction of large states, low-tax states, multinationals and absent IGOs in the globalised marketplace. Building upon these findings, section two uses original data to evidence how, within OECD BEPS, established societal interests became more influential vis-à-vis multinationals during the wave of saliency from 2012-2016.

Change Makers Research – Perceptions of Waste Management within the International Cohort. Executive Summary [→], Presentation Slides [→]

This research investigates how international students in London perceive the design of the recycling services in a new country, and whether this affects a tendency to recycle overall. 83 survey responses were gathered, with student opinions measured through Likert-scaled prompts. Results showed it was not international students but those without public recycling prior to university who found recycling less accessible, and that these students came from the UK and abroad.