From Tuesday 25 to Thursday 27 August 2026, Bravio takes part in the Synergy Hackathon on Vlieland: 48 hours of work on a resilient energy system, under the theme Resilience by Design, within the Into The Great Wide Open festival. For us it is a return: we took part in the 2024 edition at The Green Village, and that one stayed with us.
The number that stuck: 99.9654 per cent
In early 2024 we were at the Synergy Hackathon at The Green Village at TU Delft: 21 teams, four challenges from real challenge owners, 48 hours. One number from that weekend never left: the Dutch electricity grid achieves a supply reliability of 99.9654 per cent. That is absurdly good, and it is under pressure. Appliances, charging points and solar roofs are added every day, while companies with sustainable plans sit on waiting lists because the grid is full. Simply putting more copper in the ground is not the answer; the system itself has to change.
In our team, Symbiotics, we worked on decentralised answers to that question. And it did not stop at the weekend: challenge owner Alliander invited the team to their office in Arnhem to develop the idea further, and from one of the other teams a foundation came forward to build along. That is exactly what the organisers judge a hackathon by: what happens in the 49th hour, after the 48 hours of building.
From Anthropocene to Symbiocene
Why this subject? Bravio was founded with a preference for organisations that contribute materially to the climate task, and that choice comes from somewhere. The environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls our era the Anthropocene and sets an alternative against it: the Symbiocene, an era in which we build systems that are in balance with their surroundings. That idea is what drew James out of the financial sector and into energy innovation.
Nature is a serious teacher here. Mycelium connects trees underground into a network that shares information and nutrients with no central control: a decentralised system that simply works. And the bumps on a humpback whale's fins inspired shipbuilders to a vessel that turns surprisingly tightly. Anyone wanting to design an energy system that is local, integrated and resilient will find plenty of usable examples in nature.
Nowhere in nature do you see one central organ orchestrating everything. The energy system of the future is decentralised, local and integrated. That calls for clever technology, and just as much for empathy with all the people attached to it.
Those words come from the interview recorded with James during the 2024 edition. The aftermovie of that weekend gives a good sense of what a hackathon like that sets in motion.
What we are bringing this year
Since that first hackathon, Bravio has moved on: we still think along on strategy, and above all we build. AI workspaces that run at companies every day, in the energy sector too. This year's theme connects to that directly: resilience is designed into processes and systems, and you demonstrate it with measurements.
That last part is our specific contribution. In a weekend full of demos, the hardest question is: can you demonstrate that it works, next week as well, and when it is busy? That is classic quality thinking, applied to AI. First make sure your measurement is sound, then draw conclusions. James is trained as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and it is precisely that combination of process discipline and building things ourselves that we are taking across the Wadden Sea. Anyone applying AI to grid management, congestion or client processes gets more out of that than out of another demo.
Beyond that we simply do our trade: mapping processes, naming where time and energy leak away, and turning an idea into something a challenge owner can pick up within 48 hours.
Are you coming too?
The Synergy Hackathon runs from Tuesday 25 to Thursday 27 August 2026, on the festival grounds at the Kampweg in Oost-Vlieland. Taking part is free for the eighty selected participants, registration is through Eventbrite, and anyone staying over does so on one of the two ships in the harbour. The organisers work with real challenges from partners at three levels of scale: local, community and system.
Do you work on the energy transition, at a grid operator, a municipality, a cooperative or a developer, and will you be there? Come and say hello. Want to know, island aside, what AI can demonstrably contribute in your organisation? Book an intro call, or first read how we look at the energy sector at it.