EUSEW POLICY SESSION ON DIGITALIZATION OF EUROPE’S ENERGY TRANSITION - RESULTS

We were pleased to be part of the EU Sustainable Energy Week by organizing a policy session on "The power of Digital Innovation Hubs to accelerate the digitalization of Europe’s energy transition". Have a look into the results and watch the session recordings. The presentations and slido results can be found on expera (if you are not a member yet, you can register for free).

Finally, we could meet at least in a hybrid format to discuss the challenges of digitalising the energy system. Together with DG ENERGY (European Commission), Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Energy Environment Agency and Energijos Skirstymo Operatorius (ESO) we organised the policy session "The power of Digital Innovation Hubs to accelerate the digitalization of Europe’s energy transition", which took place on 27 September (14:30-16:00 CEST) in Brussels and online.

Background

In their framework for the establishment of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH), DG ENERGY and DG CONNECT jointly organize the process to gather national, regional and local energy and digital players to support investments, skills and expertise of strategic digital technologies in the energy system, from innovation to deployment. Beyond greening and stabilizing energy supply, the digitalisation of the energy system shall boost the EU competitiveness and open new global markets for innovations made by SMEs. This is a key purpose of the innovation platform that the EC is about to establish. But while many SMEs act globally, they also know well the needs in their regional ecosystems. This session wants to unveiled potentials to exploit the experiences and networks of involved SMEs, their associations, local and regional business development centres and last not least the local and regional governmental institutions.

Agenda

Moderation

The session was moderated by Andreas Corusa, JPP SES Knowledge Community, (B.A.U.M. Consult GmbH), who guided us throughout the session and involved the audience with interactive but also tricky poll questions. What do you think which continent has the biggest micro grid capacites installed? Check out all questions and poll results here.

Key Note

The session kick-started with the key note by Giulia Serra, DG ENER and Yves Paindaveine, DG CNCT, European Commission on "Building a shared vision and pathway between the energy and digital players for digitalising the energy system: the Digitalisation of Energy Action Plan and the Digital Innovation Hubs”

Panel Discussion

A panel discussion followed on Activities and expectations towards digitalising the energy transition with the help of Local Energy Systems.

Daniel Stetter (Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO) presented an example of Energy Innovation Hubs in practice, followed by Gerfried Cebrat (effiziente.st Energie-Umweltconsulting), who represented the JPP SES project EPC4SES and gave insights into the latest research results on digitalising local energy systems. Our JPP SES Co-Chair Orsolya Küttel (National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary) gave some examples on how to bring digital energy solutions to market and adoption by introducing i.a. our partner network of Living Labs and Testbeds as well as Digital Platform Providers. How do Microgrids work in practice? This was explained by Patrick Biard, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Énergie Environnement who is also the lead of INTERREG Alpine Space project AlpGrids. Last but not least, expectations of DSOs to digital Local Energy Systems were highlighted by Gintare Skorupskaitè from Energijos Skirstymo Operatorius, ESO Lithuania.

Q&A Session

In the end there was room for a Q&A session for the audience.