Born in this unique city called Istanbul in 1989. I guess had a pretty happy childhood. Then I was 11, when my parents moved to another city called Bursa and told me “kiddo, we’re sending you to the UK, you will learn English there”. In 2000, I guess my head was more water than brain so it was pretty easy to trick me. My dad told me that I would need to take a plane to go there, and I was like -hell yeah! got to take a plane ride finally!, was sold in a second. Now, laughing while typing these… At the age of 11, if you’re alone in UK with limited language skills, it simply sucks 🙂

 

High school was the place where I decided to become an engineer. Then at the age of 17 I was doing B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering in 2006. I always had an interest in aerodynamics and power plants which lead me to focus on wind energy during my bachelor studies. I was lucky enough to set a summer field-internship with a German wind turbine manufacturer called Enercon. To me it was a big catch and I was super happy, until the time that they stated that they could not let me into the erection fields, then my internship got cancelled in like half-an-hour.

I was dreaming of becoming a wind energy engineer but I hadn’t even seen a single turbine from close. I was pretty obsessed with the field intern. After the rejection from Enercon, I had to find another way to get inside the fields. At the time I could find that there was this crane company called SARILAR, apparently they were the biggest crane guys in Turkey that most of the wind farm investors were working with them. I set a meeting with the project manager and convinced the cool dude to take me in to the turbine construction fields where I saw installations of many Vestas and Enercon machines. 

 

 

After I completed my my B.Sc., in 2010, I moved to Istanbul and started working for Lagerwey Wind,  a Dutch, direct drive wind turbine manufacturer. I was doing wind assessment and micrositing (positioning wind turbines, due diligence studies etc.) with WAsP and generating reports. My boss was a cool person but the company wasn’t doing that great in Turkey.

In the meantime, there were tenders for wind farm grid connections and companies were in need of ball-park-figure annual energy 

production calculations for their wind farm license application bids. This is pretty much what I was doing at the time in Lagerwey Wind, thus I decided to do some freelance engineering work. I earned some good money by doing that. I kept doing this till Technical University of Denmark accepted my application for M.Sc. in Wind Energy.

2011 was the year when I got in to the DTU Wind. First semester was like hitting a brick wall to be honest, because I realized that the math skills I had from my B.Sc. weren’t good enough and my technical language skills were pretty limited. It took many nights in the computer lab and unofficial attendance of some bachelor degree courses to close the gap. Things were much better from the second semester, my aerodynamic interests and my micrositing experience were driving my motivation.

At the end of the first year, summer of 2012, I had arranged an internship in ECOFYS, a Dutch wind farm concultancy company located in Utrecht, Netherlands. Ok this one is a long one. I didn’t have enough money to keep the place I was living in DK thus I kind of moved to NL. I found a cheap shared  flat where lived with three other Dutch students but there was a problem; the very first day of my (paid) internship the HR asked me to come for a talk at the very first minute I stepped in to the company. They told me that as a non-EU citizen I was not allowed by the government to do my internship in NL. This was pretty annoying, since I had pre-paid my rent for the summer, had flight tickets ready and had almost zero money left in the pocket. On the top of that, really wanted that internship because they had access to many long term wind measurements from super high met. masts which was not very easy to get just to satisfy your curiosity… Luckily, I knew a Turkish guy who knew this other Turkish guy owning a this second hand industrial cooking equipment trade business. I asked him if I could work there part-time without an official record, and he said ok. Suddenly I was working like a refugee into this industrial stoves reselling business which was out of my wind energy interest – a bit. At least it solved the financial problem. Then went back to ECOFYS again and convinced this engineer, who was a DTU graduate, to unofficially do my internship. It all worked fine. Eventually cooking business payed well, somehow, and completed my internship.

The black & white photo of mine on the right is from my room in Utrecht. A super cool dude, Maarten, took the shot with a 4×5 large format camera where you need to adjust the exposure, the focus and the diaphragm manually. On the top of that you need to know how sensitive the film you are using in it as there are no sensors or electronic chips telling you how bright the photo would be. Depth of field and sharpness is amazing as you have analog infinite pixels.

Back to the timeline, 2013 was the year that I got the MSc degree and got a PhD position in DTU Wind. The topic was about simulating wind turbines in spectral LES simulations. DTU did not have a spectral CFD solver at the time but I had a cool professor, Jens Nørkær Sørensen, who allowed me to develop my own cluster-level CFD solver. By the year of 2015 I had successfully developed my own LES solver, run in DTU’s clusters and validated by various atmospheric and wind turbine simulations. Was pretty satisfying… Jens if you ever bump into these lines, I once again thank you! In 2016, completed my PhD and started as a postdoc in DTU Wind.

Meanwhile I accomplished one of my life goals; buy a motorcycle and go to Alps. The cheapest motorcycle with ABS brakes in Denmark was Yamaha FZ6 at the time. It was from year 2007, bought it from Jutland (East DK). I kept the bike for over 3 years and of course, rode it to Alps.

 

 

I didn’t do the Alps trip alone but with Kristian, the more handsome guy on the left. Its already a challenge to ride through all the passes in Alps. On the top of that we had to ride our bikes from DK… To ease our lives, we put out machines to the train in Hamburg to pass Germany. This saved us from the extra 14 hours of ride and provided a night of sleep in the train. By the end of the train ride, we were in Swiss border in the early morning, started the engines and the road-trip was on! I literally can talk about this trip for hours.

By 2018 life took a poignant turn with the loss of my father. A period of reflection led me to reside in the family house and accept a temporary position at BOSCH as a production engineer, managing CNC machines. This experience was a stark deviation from my academic background but proved to be a valuable lesson in adaptability and resilience. During my tenure, I had the privilege of forming meaningful connections with exceptional individuals at the company.

In 2019, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy launched its R&D center and introduced several wind turbine research and development roles in Izmir. I was honored to receive an offer to join the team as a Loads and Aerodynamics Engineer. As the years have rolled by, it’s now 2023, marking four years since my inception at Siemens Gamesa. Over the last two years, I have had the privilege of leading a team, fostering innovation and progress within our endeavors.