Smart energy – a new challenge accepted!

Smart energy customer workshop

The 2021 international customer workshop attracted a high level of interest as the first ITEA event aimed at bringing together several energy stakeholders – some new to ITEA – and discussing how this new challenge could be impacted by potential ITEA projects.

This event gathered around twenty major players in the energy sector representing the energy value chain – energy providers, Transmission System Operators (TSO), Distribution System Operators (DSO) and large energy users – and around twenty solution providers – large companies and SMEs – of the energy sector.

The event was organised over three weeks with a kick-off session to set up the objectives and to present the way to work together in an online environment. Afterwards, four ‘Challenges sessions’ were organised dedicated to the presentation of the needs and pain points of the energy sector players. Next, there was some brainstorming to generate ideas for potential collaborative research projects that could solve some of the challenges expressed during the previous phase. Included in this online brainstorming were live sessions gathering people interested in an idea proposed by a participant. Finally, the customer workshop was concluded by a Closing session that presented the summary of the exchanges and a keynote on how to address the energy challenges together. This format was designed to allow for the flexible participation of the attendees and to maximise the interaction despite the absence of physical meetings.

The four sessions on the challenges were organised around a central topic that was of common interest for all the participants of the session. The subjects covered were:

• ‘New usages’ to discuss how to benefit from the energy sector transformations – more flexible grids, the development of electric vehicles, the development of simulation – to create new business;
• ‘Flexibility’ to address the relationship between the electricity markets players, congestion management, new businesses, new forecasting tools and the trends for IT systems to support the electricity grid;
• ‘Optimisation of the energy usage’ to share experience on the best practices to optimise the usage of energy and to discuss how to improve energy efficiency in industrial sectors such as automotive, the forging industry, manufacturing plants, telecom and cloud;
• ‘Multi-energy’ to analyse the impact of renewable energy sources – wind energy and photovoltaic energy – and the evolution towards a more complex and distributed energy system.

After all these sessions, the workshop produced some interesting ideas that may give birth to future ITEA research projects. Some of the ideas were focused on new opportunities generated by the availability of data, the control and the simulation of complex and heterogenous systems or the facilitation of transactions between the energy value chain partners.

In addition to the emergence of these solid ideas and of some collaborations, the workshop has helped to establish progress towards a shared vision of the research priorities to address the important transformation underway in the energy sector. The participants have developed new connections that will be important as no single player can tackle the current energy challenges alone. In conclusion, this workshop was very valuable in initiating ITEA’s activity in this new Smart energy challenge.

A full report of the Smart energy customer workshop can be downloaded from the ITEA Call 2021 Project idea tool (login required).