 Good afternoon from Berlin. The sun is also shining here very brightly so a lot of solar power powering my laptop right now. That's a good thing. I just very quickly want to introduce myself. I worked with smart grids or in a smart grid project for about five and a half years. I was head of project coordination of a project here in Berlin that set up a smart grid from 2011 on. So very early in this whole smart grid area. After that I quickly co-founded an accelerator for high-tech startups that was very digital centered and for the last three and a half years I worked at a think tank here in Berlin to look at the policy side of what could the energy transition do better or what could policy do better with the energy transition and also smart grids obviously played a big role in that. Now I also have a new job which is also quite exciting. I will from now on try to co-found a new NGO that actually takes this whole think tank business to another level and does more or less a do tank. So some kind of a project developer for regulatory fringe cases. If you like I can talk about in the Q&A a bit more about that but now without further ado I would like to jump right in into my talk about smart grids today. So to get started I want to start with what kind of problem do we actually have. I think most of you know what kind of emission trajectories we are currently on. We now have the corona crisis which will bring emissions down quite a bit but that's not something we want to apply every year to reach our climate goals. Also the IPCC says that we need some kind of unprecedented political effort in order to reach our goals and I just want to have a very quick view on how are we doing so far. There is an initiative called Climate Action Tracker that actually looks at the policies in place around the world that try to reach the the climate goals of the Paris Agreement and as you can see gray or red or yellow is not so good and how are we doing well we are doing not so good when we look at it in total. So we need to speed things up. We need to step up our game concerning the energy transition. Obviously there are different areas where we can actually reduce our emissions but the energy sector is the sector that is probably the easiest where we have the biggest impact in a very short amount of time and that is what counts that we bring down our emissions as soon as possible. We also and that is something that especially here in Germany is discussed a lot maybe not that openly but a lot of people tend to think that there will be some kind of magical technology that will save us all and that we just have to wait for that. In the Greek mythology there was the Deus Ex Machina that came and saved the whole play when everything seemed lost and we get more and more the impression also here in Germany in German politics that people are waiting for this Deus Ex Machina to bring us closer to our climate goals but that's not what we need to do we need to seize every chance that we can get we need to use every options and I am convinced that we already have a lot of concepts and we already have a lot of technology that we need in order to bring this transition forward. One of those I'm convinced are smart grids. So I just want to very quickly introduce yourselves again to the concept of smart grids. What is a smart grid actually? It lost a bit of its charm as a as a buzzword in the last couple of years I think it it was now blockchain that everyone was talking about and not smart grids anymore but especially around the time when we finished the first of our consecutive projects here in Berlin which was around 2014-2015 everyone was talking about smart grids in the energy business. The joint research center of the European Union the JRC doesn't have a database which actually counts and analyzes most of the smart grid projects within Europe. Last time I checked they counted about 950 projects I don't know Yvonne maybe you can tell us a bit more later on if your project also is part of this database. Ours was and I tried to check and I didn't find it anymore so maybe they they kick out old projects I don't quite know but there is quite a lot going on with smart grids in Europe so what is a smart grid actually? When you Google smart grid you will most likely get something like this you can see here. There are houses there are different kinds of production units, wind farms, solar panels and roofs and a lot of times there is some kind of central energy management system in the middle that actually steers everything and controls everything but there is no universal definition of a smart grid and a lot of projects use their own definitions but there is some kind of a common ground I would say and that is if you take a physical energy infrastructure that could be a gas infrastructure that could also be electricity obviously and overlay this infrastructure with a data and information layer that is like the common ground for all smart grid projects. Smart grids can also vary in size obviously they can be as big as Estonia a lot of people would argue that Estonia also already has some kind of nationwide smart grid they can also be as small as a household sometimes you can also find the notion of a microgrid which sounds a bit similar in most cases a microgrid is just different to the account that it can go let's say offline it can disconnect from the public grid and still keep on going so microgrids are very often islands there are boats you could say that every cruise ship is some kind of a microgrid maybe not as intelligent as we will talk about here later but you could argue for that also smart grids can vary in size but they can also vary in the kind of components they use I think most common are things like solar installations wind farms but also electric vehicles heat pumps and storage devices from batteries to other storage devices I will come to that later also another thing is that smart grids are even though we might not realize all the time more or less the foundation of other technologies like demand site management you already mentioned in your introduction that we need to bring production and consumption into balance we can do that with making demand and production more flexible there is also something that uses forecasts and obviously the technological basis for that is some kind of smart grid approach that might all sound a bit a general so I want to give you an idea about a real smart grid the one I worked on for five and a half years which like I said is situated in Berlin on an old energy campus where in the 1920s huge the the municipal gas company actually made gas from coal to fire up the street lights and they stored it in a in a big isometer in a big gas storage which is now a landmark and that is a campus that is nowadays very known for its its innovation potential there's a university on there there are a lot of startups and in the middle of that there is this micro smart grid we put up there you can see now we combined the micro grid and the smart grid that is because we use a lot of technologies that are actually smart grid technologies we are connected to the public grid but we could also go into islanding mode and cut off from the public grid and do our own operations as well so that was how the name came into being and like I said we also used a lot of different elements for the smart grid the the project itself actually consisted of a lot of consecutive joint research project within total about 80 companies universities research institutes that worked on this project and there were it started with one project where some kind of basic infrastructure was being put up a solar mover that moved with the sun a battery storage and an EV charging station but then it grew further and further and with every new research project that was added to the portfolio the micro smart grid grew in the end we had four solar installations on the campus we had six micro wind turbines two of them actually on the landmark gasometer in 18 meters height we had micro CHPs we have a large CHP that is now hooked up to the micro smart grid fuel cells a lot of different things and it developed into some kind of testbed also for other research institutes we had the ability to measure what is happening on a very very fast scale we could measure 44,000 data points a second so we could also do frequency controls it was more a research project than an actual smart grid like we would imagine to roll out all over Europe I also mentioned EVs it was also not only a testbed for different energy technologies but also for shared mobility with this micro smart grid that was the home base let's call it like this for the world's first fully electric car sharing fleet that went into operation which was multi-city so it was the first fully electric and that was the home base there and we could also use those cars to do all kinds of research about vehicle to grid but some vehicles that were actually able to feed back energy into the grid when it was needed so we could add more batteries to our portfolio to steer we did tests with autonomous driving where they three deep printed driverless shuttle that was going around the campus and was bringing people people to the research institutes we had inductive charging infrastructure so all kinds of other research projects actually came in there and added to the value of what we can actually see we also not only did research but we also did some kind of education I already mentioned that we had a university with on the campus so there were a lot of groups with international politicians that came in and wanted to see how do smart grids work and we had a large showroom that was more or less in the middle of this whole thing and with bulletproof windows to the transformer to the switching units to the batteries which was quite complicated to put up because there are a lot of standards in place that you have to meet also I already said we could switch to islanding mode with a chp plant that was actually building up the the the grid frequency and then the solar arrays could actually add up to that the the vision behind that was to show what is technologically possible what is feasible and to duplicate that to make it obviously a bit more easy to implement but to duplicate that into many many districts that actually interconnect in the end that can help each other if there is a shortage of energy in one district it could be leveled out with another micro smart grid and this project here this micro smart grid on the Europe campus to be honest it was and is far from economically viable to build some kind of a joint business case around that but that wasn't necessary because I think a research projects don't have to be economically viable all the time but we later on founded a spin-off that actually took some of the concepts from this micro smart grid and transferred that to the real world so some elements are actually applied in Berlin and around Europe by this company called Inno to Grid right now we also saw and that is now something like a lessons learned that most of the problems we had were not with technology so from a technological point of view pretty much everything we could imagine was possible but to build business cases around that wasn't very hard because it was restricted very toughly by regulation by expensive metering concepts you have to put up to be compliant with regulation but technology was never the problem we so we know we have a product problem we know that we do have technological solutions to that and what was for me very interesting was the three and a half years of policy work I did afterwards because my time at the campus was very hands-on and we were very deep into the technology and into how our control system would work and stuff like that but we didn't actually take a lot of care about how would that be on a macroeconomic scale if we would reply that time and time again I for one thing which I learned was that a smart grid alone with some kind of control unit in the middle is not very realistically because to optimize the state of the smart grid needs some kind of incentive and this incentive if you want to scale needs to be some kind of price signals that come from from markets that are overhead also I think that the the notion of autonomy of being able to cut off from the grid and do your own thing that might be something that from a technology point of view is very interesting and is fancy to achieve but it is not something that on a macro level should be encouraged because then you have people most of the times in those projects there is more money than vulnerable users around would have and you take money out of the system by optimizing yourself so it's a it's a bit of a yeah a situation that you don't want to scale up and how can smart grids still help us with the energy transition to bring it forward I think they are very important piece of the puzzle when we look at how prices of technology developed then I think there is one thing that a lot of people don't realize if those prices undercut a certain threshold then some kind of universal truth that we thought to be relevant actually shifts I give you one example when solar prices or offshore wind prices continue to fall like they did in the past and we will come to a point where the grid is more expensive to connect them to the grid and has more problems because you don't have problems with exact terms you have huge infrastructure projects that take a lot of time whereas it the the informal times you always said put the wind mills there where you have the most wind nowadays the technology is so far that in when you take the business as a whole other of the macroeconomic factors then in as a system cost it is cheaper to put the wind mills where there's less wind but you have the demand for the wind and you don't need that much infrastructure projects also and smart grids can obviously play a big part in that to bring wind and solar capacity into the field another thing is that with this super cheap sustainable technology our children will be used to that there was a large comprehensive study of the Berkeley labs which looked at success factors for wind farms and for their acceptance within the communities and one factor was participation and one factor was if you grow up with the wind farm in your vicinity you are much more likely to have a positive attitude to what that so that is something I think over the years we will see the effect of that and also smart grids tend to be more participative and can have a positive impact also on the on the acceptance of renewable energy installations I come to my last two slides now besides acceptance there's also a transformative impact of local smart grids because they bring value into the communities if you think about a huge wind farm that is put up in front of your community that you don't participate with then the value added goes somewhere else if your community actually initiates a wind farm like this if you put yourself together with local businesses with industry and initiate a project like this then the value added the money stays within your community and that also I think is can be a huge contributing factor to bring the energy transition as a whole forward when we look at policy now I think that and I found this this little picture that is actually not about energy at all but about organizational structures and if you look at some of those of those little figures I think there are remarkable similarities to what we actually need within policy to get the energy transition going one thing obviously is from hierarchies to networks there is something that the energy transition brings naturally but also from controlling to empowering if I put myself in the shoes of policy makers right now I think it's very hard for them to let go and to let some kind of self-organization within smart grid projects within communal projects within cooperatives happen but it's actually something that is empowering the people to be a part of the energy transition and bring it forward and I think this new kind of mindset is something that plays a crucial role and I hope that is a also a good introduction for Christine who will later on talk about the values that policy actually needs to incorporate into their smart grid efforts and with that thank you very much