At the E-world 2020 energy & water 2020 (http://www.e-world-essen.com), empirica organised three thematic sessions in the Energy Transition Forum, presenting insights from the programme SINTEG: Showcases Intelligent Energy (http://www.sinteg.de/en/). Up to 120 experts attended the events, listened to the presentations from the five Showcase regions, and discussed the insights with the presenters. From 11 to 13 February 2020, the E-world took place in Essen, Germany. The E-world is an annual leading European trade exhibition for the digitisation of the energy sector. SINTEG is a large-scale programme co-funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi). The five Showcase regions are named C/sells, DESIGNETZ, enera, NEW 4.0, and WindNODE. empirica is part of the accompanying undertaking for SINTEG. The three Forum events dealt with the following subjects:
SINTEG shows the way: Current highlights for the energy future
This Forum presented current highlights from the SINTEG programme, showing that SINTEG covers all key issues of the energy turnaround. The highlights stemmed from the five key fields of SINTEG: (1) Flexibility potentials and integrated energy, (2) Flexibility mechanisms and markets, (3) SINTEG as a real-life lab, (4) Digitisation, (5) Acceptance and participation. The focus was on (1) and (4), dealing for example with blackout prevention in local energy cells, an energy-autonomous farm, using the flexibility of heavy industry plants, a blockchain solution for loading e-cars, and energy storage in steel facilities.
SINTEG explores: Real-world labs: how do they work, what lessons have we learned?
This Forum event was a fixed item for a consulate delegation visiting the E-world. The SINTEG showcases are large real-world laboratories set up for the “Energiewende”, the ongoing transition to renewables in Germany. The Forum showed that the real-world lab principle has been applied successfully in the Showcase regions. New technologies have been enabled in the real-world laboratories; innovative regulations played an important role; and some concepts developed can be used as parts of political agendas to restructure regions that are currently based on coal exploitation. The Forum also showed that public relations, internationalisation and networking were important for the consortia running the showcases.
SINTEG connects: Agreeing and participating: how the energy turnaround succeeds
The energy turnaround becomes evermore tangible in technical, economic and regulatory terms, and climate change makes it evermore urgent. Many citizens are engaged in developing intelligent energy. At the same time, the energy turnaround also faces reservations: for example against windmills and energy grid expansion. In this Forum, Showcase experts reported experiences from their activities to get citizens on board for the energy turnaround. C/sells and enera showed how participation models can create enthusiasm rather than rejection; DESIGNETZ elaborated on how to convince tenants to install intelligent energy facilities; NEW 4.0 presented latest results from their population survey; WindNODE pointed to the cultural dimension of the energy turnaround in terms of contemporary arts.
“Gut besucht waren die von empirica organisierten Foren auf der E-world 2020”, (c) BMWi
