InteGrid’s Energy Day bringing innovation to energy distribution
The Energy Day 2018 occurred on the 27th of June at the EDP Headquarters in Lisbon. This European event allowed to disseminate several initiatives, that promote energy transition, through the 28 EU member states. The InteGrid Energy Days organized by the project consortium and entitled “From Intelligent Energy Solutions to disruptive business models”, aimed to promote synergies between small and medium enterprises (SME), industrial companies and research institutions, as well as to share with the project's stakeholders' results already achieved or currently being developed by the consortium. This event gathered around 100 participants from more than 10 nationalities.
Pedro Godinho Matos, InteGrid project coordinator, welcomed the participants and opened the event with an overview of the project, followed by several sessions, where both academia and technology organizations shared their perspectives.
Jorge Vasconcelos, from NEWES (NEW Energy Solutions), as keynote speaker opened the afternoon session, which was followed by a debate with several project stakeholders moderated by Ferreira Pinto, Director at EDP Distribuição.
Being InteGrid’s Energy Day a forum for innovative vision, in the final part of the day 10 startups presented disruptive solutions on three areas: Electric Vehicles (EV), Smart Grid technology and Renewable Energies
On the EV topic we had
INFRAENER, a company focused on three sectors: energy, special installation and maintenance. Regarding special installations, the company is working on the creation of intelligent renewable energy generation systems/stations for charging EVs. Another of the companies working on EV technology is
EVolution, focused on electric mobility sector and with a special focus on BATT, a product designed and developed with reused certified batteries used for several applications, where the goal is to reduce waste of material and cost. Accordingly, with
IEA Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2018, there is already over 3 million electric cars on the road, so there is a need to be prepared to answer this massive transformation.
On the Smart Grid technology topic, we had
Bandora,
Ionseed,
Lightenjin,
Trigger Systems and
Watt-IS. The first company is focused on turning buildings more intelligent by adapting buildings to people, to new challenges of energy consumption and to EU Directives regarding Nearly Zero Energy Buildings. The second company, Ionseed, a high performance IOT infrastructure, presented distributed energy storage as service for answering to renewable energy sources as the only source of energy consumption, by controlling how consumers store energy in batteries and heaters. The third, Lightenjin, with smart lighting and smart sensors solutions pretend to make cities smarter by taking advantage of lights distribution to give useful information such as EV charging stations availability, streets security and others, to several kinds of users. The fourth company is an eco-innovative startup with a worried look on the increase of food demand and increase of RE, uses power flexibility to increase efficiency and demand with irrigation systems. The last company on this topic, Watt-IS, focus on smart metering data and the use of this data by improving users’ energy consumption activities through energy efficiency with a virtual energy manager that give users notification with suggestions.
On the Renewable Energies topic, we had Jungle.ai, SOLROM and
PEAKapp. Jungle.ai is at the forefront of applied research in artificial intelligence, targeting the ever expanding streams of data within organisations to help to predict what operations will look like in the near future. SOLROM is a consultant specialized on solar remote operations and maintenance and
PEAKapp is a consortium composed of a team of complementary organizations tackling the challenge of developing smart services to better utilise electricity from renewable sources. The EU set by 2020 the target of 20% final energy consumption from renewable sources. Latest
news from June of this year show a new target for 2030 agreed by the Commission, the Parliament and the Council for 32% of renewables.
Ângelo Sarmento, Administrator at EDP Distribuição, closed the session stressing that events like this “open the way to the future”, a more intelligent future for electric grids. The event presentations can be consulted
here and the event video
here.
