The Smarter Europe – Conference of Green Transition Technologies

The Smarter Europe conference, with this year's main theme "Green Transition Technologies", is a companion to The Smarter Europe fair. It took place on June 13 and 14 in the conference center of the fairgrounds in Munich. A total of 37 different lectures took place over two days. Representatives of various companies and organizations related to sustainable technologies participated.

Anže Jerman

Product manager

As part of the "The Smarter Europe" conference, lectures were held in four areas: Intersolar (photovoltaic industry), EES (energy storage), Power2drive (electric vehicles and charging infrastructure) and EM-Power (power grid development). The mentioned areas are interwoven with each other and depend on each other, and further development must ensure that the applications that are part of these areas are mutually compatible and connectable.

At the Intersolar conference, they discussed the further development of photovoltaic modules and inverters. There was a lot of talk about placing large photovoltaic power plants in space, with alternative ways of placing them on agricultural land and water surface levels being the main topics. According to data from the conference, the REpower EU program for Europe plans to increase the total installed capacity of photovoltaic power plants fivefold from the current 210 GW to 1 TW by 2030.

Various electrical energy storage technologies were discussed at the EES conference, with battery storage units being the most talked about at the moment. The electricity grid is currently at a crossroads due to the saturation of energy produced in photovoltaic power plants. As a result, on the sunniest days there are negative prices for the production of electricity obtained from photovoltaic power plants. The solution is energy storage, which can store excess energy at peaks in electricity production. The key challenge is coordinating the balance of production and consumption of electricity in the network. For this purpose, a greater activity in the development and production of battery storage systems has already been detected in Europe.

The Power2drive conference was held in the name of electric vehicles and the associated charging infrastructure. The European Union's plans for a gradual transition to electric vehicles were presented. Company representatives presented examples of good practices for the integration of charging infrastructure so that it does not become too much of a burden on the electricity network.

At the EM-Power conference, they discussed the integration of the previously mentioned applications into the network, the upgrade of the current network, and predictions regarding the consumption of electricity in the future. There have been discussions about connectivity and communication between the applications involved.

As a final thought from this year's conference, I can mention that in the coming years a lot will happen in all four areas of green transition technologies. The development of electric vehicles is compared to the development of vehicles with internal combustion engines. The only difference is that the development of vehicles with internal combustion engines took place over a century, while the development of electric vehicles will obviously be limited to a much shorter period of time. European manufacturers and organizations related to e-mobility are aware that the mistake we witnessed years ago in the field of photovoltaics, when most production processes moved to Asia, must not be repeated. With the boom in photovoltaics in Europe, we became more and more or even completely dependent on Asian manufacturers. A similar story is currently unfolding in the development of electric vehicles and related infrastructure, but the key is to keep the development and production of applications related to e-mobility in Europe.

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