The Sixth IC1 Workshop: IC1 confirms its commitment to accelerate the smart grids deployment
12-14 November 2019, Paris (France)
Please find the agenda and the contributions presented during the event at this link.
The Sixth IC1 Workshop was co-organized by the IC1 co-leads and the French Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy and Think Smart Grids – the association representing the French eco-system of smart grids. It brought together experts from IC1 Countries, ministerial representatives, industry, smart grids stakeholders, funding agencies, international organizations and initiatives such as IEA and ISGAN from around the world, to discuss IC1 recent achievements and future activities towards smart grid development and deployment.
This workshop consisted of a Public event on November 12th, held during the European Utility Week (EUW) and the sixth IC1 deep-dive Workshop, a two-day closed-door meeting held on November 13th-14th and hosted at Business France (Nov. 13th) and at the French DSO ENEDIS premises (Nov. 14th). The overall event made it possible to move forward from the activities agreed on during the fifth IC1 Workshop held last May in Vancouver as a side event of CEM10 and MI-4 meetings.
The Public Workshop
12th November 2019, Paris
International collaboration confirmed as a key to enable the clean energy transition
The Public event was opened by greetings from Laurent Michel, General Director for Energy & Climate, Ministry for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy (France) and representatives of the three IC1 co-Leading Nations: Yuming Sun, Minister Counsellor of Chinese Embassy in Paris (China), Narayana Prasad Padhy Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee-IITR (India) and Stefania Rosina, Plenipotentiary Minister of the Italian Embassy in Paris (Italy). Particularly, Laurent Michel stressed the importance of Smart Grids to achieve high renewables penetration, higher energy efficiency and to meet the France energy targets. The co-lead nation representatives, confirmed the importance of international collaboration and the role of smart grids in enabling Renewable Energy Sources integration, expressed appreciations for the work done so far in IC1 and pointed up their Countries’ strong involvement and commitment in Mission Innovation and in particular in IC1, dedicated to the innovation in the sector of active networks.
The event went on with the presentation of IC1 recent achievements and upcoming future activities and two interesting keynote speeches from:
Dominique Jamme, managing director from the French Energy Regulator (CRE) and Dave Turk, Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA). Dominique Jamme drew attention to the needs of the energy market players to have access to data so as to give new services, underlined the role of regulation and the importance of regulatory sand-boxes to study solutions before taking final decisions. Instead Dave Turk highlighted the clean energy progress in the different energy sectors and presented trends towards 2030 and 2040 about global energy demand, energy efficiency, share of electricity generation and Public-Private funding.
During the workshop two round tables were held: the first on “Challenges and opportunities of the network digitization”, chaired by Luciano Martini (IC1 co-lead, Italy) and the second on “Business models for smart grids and for sustainable energy projects”, chaired by Valérie-Anne Lencznar, Managing director Think Smartgrids (France).
Representatives of Utilities and Industry from all around the world took active part to the Round Tables, where the fundamental role played by digitalization and the importance of business plans were stressed.
The round table on digitalization gathered representatives of the French DSO ENEDIS (Yves Barlier, Head of Smart Grids), ETIP-SNET (Maher Chebbo, Global Chief innovation officer GE Power/ETIP SNET), two important IT service companies (Franck Freycenon, Energy & Utilities Managing Director ATOS and Christian Feisst, Greencom Networks CEO/ETIP SNET) and the Italian DSO ENEL (Robert Denda, Head of network technology and innovability at ENEL Global Infrastructure and Networks) to discuss opportunities, benefits and impacts of the network digitalization.
The importance of having a long-term vision, going beyond the Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), and the fundamental role of regulation in the implementation of smart grids systems and sustainable energy projects were highlighted in the second Round Table. The table was participated by Sally Fenton, Department of Energy & Climate Change (UK), Narayana Prasad Padhy, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee IITR (India), Alexandre Prieur, Director of Renewable energy integration, Natural Resources (Canada) and the ISGAN representative Maarten Noeninckx, ExCo Vice Chair ISGAN, Economie-Strategic Advisor Directorate-General Energy Strategy and Coordination, confirming the existing synergies and the on-going joint activities between IC1 and ISGAN.
A closing session of the Public event was dedicated to Key Announcements, where new smart grids collaboration opportunities in IC1 Countries were presented, focusing on H2020 European Calls foreseeing International cooperation. An important Announcement was made by Laurent Bochereau, European Commission DG Research and Development, relevant to the Call SC3-ES-12-2020-IA “Integrated local energy systems (Energy islands): International cooperation with India”, with opportunities for IC1 members to contribute to the development and demonstration of smart grids solutions combining different energy vectors.