Biography Sketch: Marco Liserre received the MSc and PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the Bari Polytechnic, respectively in 1998 and 2002. He has been Associate Professor at Bari Polytechnic and from 2012 Professor in reliable power electronics at Aalborg University (Denmark). From 2013 he is Full Professor and he holds the Chair of Power Electronics at Kiel University (Germany). At Kiel University he is leading a team of 25 researchers with a 2 Million Euro annual budget through third-party funded projects, with a Power Electronics Laboratory, a Medium Voltage Laboratory and a Laboratory on Batteries and Energy Conversion, in cooperation with colleagues in material science, approved for 2 Million Euro. He has been leading in the last 7 years’ third-party projects for more than 13 Million Euro (of which 5% direct company assignment) having responsibility role, among the other, within the strategic governmental 10 years' initiative "Copernicus" in Germany for the Energy Change towards 80% renewable based energy society and in a priority program of the German research Foundation DFG within a cooperative project with EPFL. Notably he has been awarded in 2013 with an ERC Consolidator Grant (European Excellence Grants) for the project "The Highly Efficient And Reliable smart Transformer (HEART), a new Heart for the Electric Distribution System". He has published 500 technical papers (1/3 of them in international peer-reviewed journals) and a book. These works have received more than 35000 citations. Marco Liserre is listed in ISI Thomson report "The world's most influential scientific minds" from 2014. He is fellow of IEEE (achieved at the age of 38) and member of IAS, PELS, PES and IES. He has been serving all these societies in different capacities. He has received the IES 2009 Early Career Award, the IES 2011 Anthony J. Hornfeck Service Award, the 2014 Dr. Bimal Bose Energy Systems Award, the 2011 Industrial Electronics Magazine best paper award and the Third Prize paper award by the Industrial Power Converter Committee at ECCE 2012, 2012, 2017 IEEE PELS Sustainable Energy Systems Technical Achievement Award and the 2018 IEEE-IES Mittelmann Achievement Award, which is the highest award of the IEEE-IES. Speech title: Unlocking the hidden capacity of the electrical grid through power electronics Abstract: Studies have revealed that the actual electrical grid is less utilized than 25 years ago: there is a higher utilization for a shorter time. This “greater demand variability” has been mostly caused by new loads, like air conditioning, but also by changes in the industrialization landscape. The wider integration of renewable energies and new loads(like heat pumps and electric vehicle charging stations) is expected to worsen the situation resulting in further congestion or underutilization of the electrical network, while their control(e. g. Load Demand Response) could relive the problem. The use of direct current(Hybrid grid) and the coordination among more energy carriers(Multimodal grids) together with Smart Grid technologies, is attempting to give to the electrical grid more flexibility in controlling the power flow by exchanging it with the dc-infrastructure or with other energy layers. Power Electronics is a key technology in all these solutions and offer the possibility to unlock the hidden potential of the grid without the need of a massive reinforcement of the electrical infrastructure.