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Brecht Dierckx

Brecht Dierckx

Director of Physical Asset Trading & Optimisation at Centrica Energy, leading trading and optimisation of flexible energy assets (battery storage, demand response) across European markets.

Sep 1, 2026

27:00
So when you're talking about scenarios, are you more thinking about sort of the pure mathematical modeling, or do you put more weight into the sort of market expertise scenarios?
27:12
You call it old school, but if you did a stint in finance and I was there in the aftermath of the credit crisis, and models, these risk neutral models were part of what caused that blow up.
27:29
And in the aftermath of that, people started thinking, okay, maybe, you know, maybe what's wrong here? Because the math works.
27:35
I didn't make a mistake.
27:36
I didn't, you know, I made sure I carried it to and everything.
27:40
And so it's some of these fundamental assumptions that underlie this that are just plain wrong.
27:45
And so you had this offshoot of people.

11 MINS LATER

38:29
Okay, Britt, I'm going to ask you one final question, which is, is there a contrarian view you hold about the energy sector?
19:25
Is that somewhere where you see another case of where you'd want a bit of human creativity alongside AI's thought process?
19:34
Yeah, absolutely.
19:35
And, you know, AI, you can break that down into a number of different technologies and then there's a number of different use cases.
19:42
And I think if you want to successfully use AI, whether that's a large language model or deep learning or reinforcement learning or just random forest or trees or... any of those different technologies, it's about recognizing where they work, but also where they don't work and making sure you have fail-safes in place, that you have human supervision to step in when they don't.
20:05
I think when it comes to batteries, that's probably the area of our portfolio where we've advanced most with automation just because The problem is so complex, right? You used to refer to it as three-dimensional chess, but I think one of your colleagues coined 96-dimensional chess.
20:22
So I started using that one.
20:25
And so I think close to 100% of the trades that we make run through algorithms.

7 MINS LATER

27:00
So when you're talking about scenarios, are you more thinking about sort of the pure mathematical modeling, or do you put more weight into the sort of market expertise scenarios?

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