 Yes. So welcome everybody and it is such a pleasure to be here today. My name is Laura Sands and the only thing, the two things maybe I should record with you both, with you all and that is, number one I am a great admirer and a huge friend of the IEA. And the second is I'm a recovering politician. Felly, mae'n fwyaf, i wneud hynny ychydig y panel yma'r ffordd cyntafol cymaint ac mae'r ffordd amgylcheddau o blynyddiadau pob ddod, mae'n siŵr i'n rai bod yn fawr i'ch gyrdd o'r ysgrifennu a'r gweithio'r wahanol o'r ffordd yma o'r ysgrifennu a'r gweithio ar y chyfl. Ond, mae'n gwneud o'r gweithio ar yr unrhyw ar ddod eich gweithio'r gwaith ei gynhau. Mae'r agenda wedi fawr o'r cyfnodd a'r cyfnodd. Fydd y cerddur ar gyfer dylwn o'r cyfnodd arddangos cyfnodd yn ei gydag. Ond rhaid ei gynllun o'r cyfnodd yn y ddefnyddio a'r cyfnodd ar gyfer pwyllgor yng ngondol. Ond mae'n ddigonio'r cyfnodd fel yma yn oed yn ei gydag o'r cyfnodd, is demand equal to supply. That is absolutely crucial. In many ways, consumers have moved from being the victim of the energy systems to being at the heart of them. As policymakers, ministers will have to create the smart systems that are going to serve them. They are going to ensure that we unlock their value. Consider that for example in the UK the number of EVs by 2050 will be the equivalent of three nuclear power stations. That is the level of opportunity that customers offer. For those who weren't here yesterday, we had the most fantastic conference which was looking at the digitally driven demand side energy system and the IEA have published an excellent report. Really I would urge you to have a look at that as soon as possible. We're here to listen to this amazing array of ministers who are taking forward their countries' agendas and driving forward change. I'm really going to open this up and ask each of them an opening question but like with all people and with all people with strong views I'm sure we will all end up going a little bit off piece to sort of really dig into what each other is saying and learning from each other. So if I can start off with Inga, the Vice Minister for Energy from Lithuania with a very exciting role that you have but I just wanted to understand a little more about where you felt the role of policy and regulation is to drive a sort of digitally enabled energy efficiency system. It's a great pleasure to attend this very important meeting because energy efficiency is the first. The greenest energy is the energy which we don't use. So talking about the digitalisation we do understand that transition towards zero carbon economy it's not possible without digitalisation, without smart systems. And when we are talking about energy efficiency measures I would like just to divide them into three parts. One of those parts is behavioural change about that layer we have been talking about yesterday and today. The second one is short term measures and the third one is long term measures between the huge investments into infrastructure, insulation of buildings, renovation of buildings. But today I would like to concentrate more on behavioural changes in order to empower people to save energy, to deal with energy efficiency it's very important to have smart solutions. So when we are talking about reducing of electricity consumption there is very important to have a smart metering system. Smart metering system of electricity smart metering system of drinking water supply smart metering systems for heating as well. But in order to have such a system and to have the best results we should empower people just to choose dynamic pricing and wholesale market so then we need a liberal energy supply market we should have a competition in the market so therefore politicians should have right decisions in right time in order to incentivise people to adapt to energy consumption. So then talking about the other part of incentives or incentivising end users to consume less during peak hours and to adapt to dynamic pricing is adapt appliances at home and to have a smart system which are incorporated into heating boilers and into as well heating a pump system in electrical vehicles charging system as well in order to shave the peak demand so that's very important as well. But when it comes to regulation and when it comes to policy makers it's very important as well to make a right decision if governments give subsidies to people and give subsidies to boilers give subsidies to electrical vehicle charges the smart element should be must. But every digitalisation have a price as well it's some kind of paradigm when we are moving to digitalisation to smart solutions it requires a lot of energy as well because data centres they consume a lot of energy so here as well it's a question how do we regulate data centres. So nowadays the European Commission about to finalise the new directive or a recast energy efficiency directive which put requirements for data centres to report every year about energy consumption as well to put some requirements concerning energy efficiency so therefore governments should as well to solve that problem how to reach energy efficiency in data centres and how to consume less energy in that case. So therefore it's a very huge question for the governments how to solve that paradigm digitalisation versus energy consumption. Thank you very much indeed and I mean in many ways the Baltics has also got very very digitally minded policies that have been in place much much longer than many other countries so it's a very very exciting road that you're going on but definitely pushing the agenda forward in Europe. Ronnie Rodriguez Vice Minister of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica When you look at how you design energy policy it's interesting because citizens do have a veto on net zero they do have a veto on our journey and you have very successfully looked at the collaboration between different stakeholders, customers how industry academia come together to actually sort of almost co-create the systems and the design of the policy which really embeds it. Please do tell us more and let us learn from you. Thank you Mr Nithlithandi it's a honour to be here part of this panel and the most important are you the audience. In Costa Rica we have many experience about this situation. The first one is mandatory the long term planning the most important are institutions not exactly the government because the institution can keep the rules in order to apply the public policies but the public policies must involve all the sectors private sector, government, academia but the most important are the consumers because inefficiencies in the previous stage is a path through to the cost of the consumers the energy fishing is part of the ecosystem Costa Rica is an error to analyse separately the energy fishing is mandatory to apply all the concept like the environment aspect economic growth, social aspect because it is necessary to use the electricity and the fuels in order to create economic growth. It is important because in some cases we focus only on appliance in other case only on electricity but we need to involve all the kind of energy in this case is mandatory in order to phase out the fuels, oils because the carbonisation is our plan and it must be part of the all public energy solution in many countries. Thank you very much and that whole issue about placing consumers, voters customers absolutely at the heart is really important and I think sometimes the energy sector is rather ignored the customer so it is very interesting your approach to co-creation. Thank you. William, Deputy Minister of Energy and Member of Parliament in Ghana globally there is a great diversity in terms of innovation of smart energy efficiency initiatives. Yesterday one of our conference meetings there was a conversation around how certain countries can actually leapfrog what let's say older incumbent system design is and I'm just wondering whether you can tell us what's happening in Ghana and how you're looking at smart energy initiatives and the innovation required? Very much Madam. It doesn't like me. What is this? Thank you very much. We're very pleased to be here and I'm good afternoon to everybody here. Ghana we've had some challenges somewhere in 2000 we embarked on massive access to electricity and projects around the country and that resulted in having a little bit of deficiency in the generation. We learned some lessons and one of the key lessons we learned was that as we were trying to increase generation the energy was being sucked away by inefficient appliances in the system. So that was identified and we embarked on the road to energy efficiency so we started very early on that road albeit we've been moving a little bit slowly. So what we identified was mainly refrigerators so we identified refrigerators, lamps and air conditioners and we brought out regulations to control the efficiency of the flux and standards and labeling. So that's what we did along the way efficient air conditioners and refrigerators appeared on the market which should have necessitated us am mending our laws but we kept at it because we had started this study and we wanted the study to be completed before we could see a way clear. So somewhere around 2005 we completed the study and realized that alone the refrigeration and lamps alone were taking something around a thousand megawatt of power that was being wasted within the system. So we added in addition to the three 19 additional appliances in 2020 to try and bring that. If only one appliance is losing so much power you can imagine what the 19 is going to do. So we have now in the regime, in the Ghanaian space a very tough regime on the standards and labeling for appliances but unfortunately hard as we work we do get influx of inefficient and dumping from brothers in Europe and America we still find appearing in the system inefficient, all discarded appliances still finding their way into the Ghanaian space. So we work very hard at it and some of the things that we have done to try them be efficient or have an efficient system at the time when we realized that incandescent lamps were not the best way to go the country actually brought in 11 million pieces of CFL for people to exchange for free and subsequent to that in the up event of LEDs we brought in additional 12 million to change CFL bulbs to LED bulbs to reduce the amount of waste in the system. So these are some of the measures that we are doing and as a result of some of these measures we have calculated that we saved something like 6.3 billion tons of CO2 Ghana alone and we also embarked on this exchange rebate program where old inefficient refrigerators government gave people who brought theirs in some vouchers to be topped up a little amount for new smart efficient refrigerators that too we believe has saved us over 200 megawatts in the system. So it's a lot being done in a country if you look at the distribution for example Ghana I think apart from Egypt in Africa it's the only country using distribution I would call it transmission distribution to yet again reduce transmission transformers, distribution transformers to reduce the losses in the system. We have upgraded our low voltage transmission lines to high voltage transmission or the 161 kV to 330 kVs all through the countries and we quite like I said we are plodding along but we are very hopeful that some of these measures that we are taking smart metrain and all that will lead to us eventually catching up, leaffrogging like you said to be where our brothers are. So that's what we are doing in Ghana Can I say I think that's exceptionally impressive and really really exciting to be absolutely bearing down on the waste in some ways you don't need any behaviour change you don't need to change your lifestyle you don't need to sort of contort yourself to have a different thing these are pieces of equipment and I wonder whether those standards are now being adopted internationally West Africa in the west coast and most of Ghana Ghana is now the lead actually and we have a lot of our brothers from the Ekuwas region and other parts of Africa coming to Ghana to learn from us which we are very proud about I think it's fantastic and I think this issue of standards has been running through this whole conference so congratulations very lovely to have you here Undersecretary for electricity, water and renewable energy from Kuwait I always think it's really important that one ends up with water and electricity being in one department so that you're actually maximising and optimising these systems we've had a few conversations today around cooling and with long hot summers in Kuwait the need for cooling is the greatest source of electricity demand along with the necessity to preserve water so in some ways it's a conflation of two key drivers of survival the challenges experienced in Kuwait are replicated in many other parts of the world and will obviously increase from what you're doing and where do you see the role of digitalisation actually unlocking the solutions that you need Thank you first of all for your organisation for this conference and it implies to be here in France to present my country for whom they don't know Kuwait is the most hot city in the Gulf so our consumption of air conditions is like 60% of our production we are trying to do the energy efficiency by maintaining the maintenance for our power plants for our grid for our networking and as well as we have several codes for building to reduce the consumption of the electricity and as well as we trying to enter the behaviour of reducing the energy and consumption of water from the beginning from the children because studying you enter in the school how to prevent the consumption as well as doing several of announcement or in the television and newspaper for reducing the electricity we all know that energy efficiency is to achieve energy in the same quality and energy but in less energy how we can do this it's very difficult but we are trying our best it's in Kuwait 50 degrees reaching the temperature our demand 60% of air conditioner we are reaching now the big load almost 16,200 megawatt so we are expecting this year almost 18 megawatt 18,000 megawatt so it's too much but we have like our Gulf GCC we can use their lines to expert electricity from them digitalisation is very important because using as my colleague first she said smart meters we are trying to use the smart meters now in our electricity and also water we have in our building the smart lights that can turn off if there is nobody and we are trying to enhance the people to reduce the air condition temperature during the big load it's like from 12 to 4 o'clock we have this is the big load so trying to reduce everything and to maintain the power for our houses and we hope we can manage this year it's a real challenge and it's very interesting how you're approaching this I wonder whether some of William's standards would be useful for your air conditioning in the sense of communicating and sharing this best practice and also the air condition we are putting the inverter we are like trying to put rules because all the government should work and all the ministers should work together to maintain the efficiency so we are pushing the minister of what's business to not allow for the air condition to enter to the country unless it has the inverter this is one of our steps it's sort of digital human beings and engineering all coming together fantastic thank you chairwoman of star charge which is digital energy you're obviously at the forefront of innovation pieces of technology the sort of technology that's available today which can provide individual benefits but is there more potential energy efficiency when hardware plus software plus services are developed I feel very strongly that business models are also really really important where you're conflating that and you have great experience so we look forward to hearing from you thanks for your question I planned to speak in Chinese just now but I think the frank communication is more important so I think I will speak in English and apologize for that my language is very poor I will try my best to describe my opinion clearly star charge is the biggest CPO in China and we have built a biggest network in China in our cloud platform more than nearly two million charger posts is working on our platform and we have hardware including the charger battery storage home storage and CNI storage and we have the converter and we have the energy looter so our product is the smart microgrid the charging station is a special microgrid the home is a microgrid we named HEMS home EMS the charging station is charging EMS so we call it SAMS the building is building EMS so we call it BAMS the commercial and the city is a smart grid so we call them SAMS we have so many EMS and so many smart grid smart microgrids but I think the platform is the soul it's very very important without a platform every hardware and every microgrid we are separate they are not smart and they don't care treating they don't care share to other grid so I think the platform very very important we have more than 1000 engineers to develop these products especially in software we have more than 500 software engineers now every year we are engaged more and more software engineers to develop this platform APP, it's named the Star Charge APP more than 10 hundred user are using it and our platform is very open we can open our facility to other CPOs more than 1000 CPOs connect and working on our platform and our platform can help them to improve the operating efficiency we help them to earn more profit so we use this platform especially very very smart and the wisdoms platform our hardware is more popular we get the number one sales performance in China and we export our hardware to Europe and Asia because our platform very very smart so I think we know what is the software defined hardware the software is digital but it's not enough we first we do every charger is smart and then the charging station is smart and every building is smart every factory, every commercial every city every country and the whole human the whole wars can connect with one website and this web is very open and this web can share your electricity because we do how to trading we should know every country's policy the trading policy and we should know how to improve the charging stations the CPOC efficiency so we should know where to construct where need a new charging station and we know how to price which price is a correct price this details a lot a lot a lot so I can't talk more in just five minutes even every day a lot of countries customer come to our company including Volkswagen, BMW Mercedes Benz a lot of OEMs and energy companies we show our platform with our platform and hardware and our service including trading and the CPO business and warranty and installation we can know pain point because we do the whole value chain so every pain point we can feel very very clearly we want to cover it solve it by technology very welcome you to start charge our office in Germany and in our business has more than six countries not a charger but also the every micro grades thanks can I just say your English is absolutely fantastic so thank you so much a very important point this isn't about software or hardware or services it is about that integration and delivering a customer focused and also very interesting about your analytics where you're constantly learning and refining the proposition through actual deployment and the energy sector is very into pilots testing things actually we've got to go out there and do stuff and then that's how we're going to really learn so coming on to doing things Google is one of those real doers who has changed our lives in many ways and it's very very good to have Zana here who's managing director of Europe the Middle East and Africa partnerships at Google all of us have been talking a lot about the demand side about the customer in many ways the energy sector we've sort of stated isn't always very responsive to customers you're understanding, you know more about me than I do and I just wanted to feel that your contribution to the energy sector to the transition is massive potentially very very important would you just explain how you're looking at the energy transition from a Google perspective and what we can all learn from your insights great, thank you I'm very happy to be here, thank you I don't know about you more than you do but over dinner I'm going to talk to you a lot so maybe I'll get there so basically I agree with the premise of your question and we do need to inform consumers so they make sustainable choices and we also need to do it in their homes at Google we have three pillars the first one is informing consumers bringing them the right information so they can make sustainable choices the second one is our own basically our own backyard how do we have our campuses, data centers, offices operate efficiently and the third one is partnering with governments with agencies, with cities to also help them achieve their sustainability goals here with the IEA we have worked for example last year when the energy crisis happened on giving users energy advice or tips on how to save energy on Google.com, on Google search so these were tips that were done in partnership with the IEA how they can save daily energy but also what kind of grants are available what's encouraged for example changing heat pumps and so on and that was a very effective partnership and an example of how we address pillar one talking about Google we have a very ambitious goal we want that by 2030 we are operating in a clean energy state 24-7 all the time that means our offices, data centers and so on are all operating with clean energy that means every email you send every YouTube video you watch by then will be supported by clean energy that's the ambitious goal also when we build data centers we want them to be very efficient today our data centers are twice as efficient as a typical data center we've also worked a lot on this in the past and today we can have five times more computer power basically from a data center with the same electricity as five years ago so that's the advancement on this side and then finally helping government users city I'll take two examples one is with UPS Google Cloud partnered with UPS so that they can use AI to design the routing, the rocketing of their vans and to reduce emissions and to use less fuel the outcome, it was a saving of 10 million gallons of fuel a year another example there's a project called a project green light and this is where we actually partner with cities and we give them data on traffic light and how cars stop and start at traffic lights and then we give this data and the cities can have their city engineers redesign traffic lights so that cars stop less and that there is less emissions and we've seen significant reduction in emissions and stop and start and air quality in certain cities like Budapest or Haifa or just now we are launching in Hamburg two examples of how we are addressing the agenda I think it's very exciting and what is particularly interesting is that the energy sector is in many ways extending itself into transport, into data and digitalisation into how to manage the water system we are moving into becoming integral to lots of other sectors we have only a few minutes left to ask the panel to comment on each other and say what from listening to all these extraordinary examples which one are you going to take from somebody else back to your country to your company that you feel you've learnt because there's just so much rich ideas and thinking I'm really finding this conference extraordinary from the point of view of learning so Inga, name your winner this isn't Eurovision Song Contest but what are the things that you've learnt? I suppose that the most important message today is that we need data in order to make a right policy decision in order to give the information for investors where to invest, how to invest therefore it's very important to open data which are possible to open to the society, for the industry as well and open data for municipalities as well because municipalities are very important to make decision concerning the energy efficiency development of renewables in the sector and here it's very important to give them a message how much they agree and how much energy do they save so therefore it's very open to have a public available data you know score board how much energy one or other municipality saved then we have a competition element it means that we push each other to be more efficient, to be more green so therefore open data interactive maps might be some interactive information for the municipalities to the government and open data so that's a crucial element in order to be efficient and green so thank you for your attention Thank you The new generation belong to the digital culture it's easier for them to incorporate these ideas so we need to take advantage in order to implement the smart system smart cities, smart buildings and everything because the only way to deal with the new clean energies in order to phase out the fuels to go the meta in order to solve the decarbonisation is to incorporate technology and the society the young people the universities have the responsibility to create a new solution and be part of the solution too Thank you and William Politicians, you may ask many questions you want but I'll give the answer I will I'm not, why am I surprised You know what I mean I think I'll go and Google a government through the energy commission of Ghana we've set up this app that links the that's part of the drive for efficiency that links the buyer and the seller together for appliances and it gives you through the Google map the address, the telephone number the center so that you can go and get it and through this app you can verify using the smart system whether indeed the equipment you bought is the genuine item so we Google and I think we need to deepen it a little bit but I would also like to use this platform to let the whole world know that this drive for efficiency as far as African countries are concerned Ghana in particular, my country and other African countries is the shared responsibility this afternoon during lunch I was talking to the commissioner for energy African Union and we talked about this shared responsibility the dumping, I touched on it and I would like to put a little bit more ink in it the dumping of these inefficient appliances in African countries it goes to affect this energy transition that we have the reduction in carbon emissions and all that it's going to affect all of us so we need to see it as a shared responsibility for all of us to work together it was mentioned that these factories need to be cited in Africa so that we can have more control on the quality of equipment or the appliance that's chained out but the problem is most of these investors they come to Africa and what they see is the proliferation of inefficient used appliances being dumped in Africa so if they were to put up the factories in Africa they'll still be disadvantaged because of our low level of incomes people will naturally gravitate towards cheap, inefficient stuff so we need from the side of the Europeans Americans to do the to stop the manufacture and export of inefficient appliances to Africa whilst we are doing our bit I think that's a very very clear message and thank you for that and I didn't recognise that that was happening so very important what have you learnt I would like to William how we manage the not to answer the question no I want to know how they manage the air-conditioner consumption and from Google we recently have an agreement with Google service agreement for IT so I have to wonderful you are the winner that is definitely the case what have you learnt or going to take back to China I especially agree the first lady's opinion the data should be open every government should pay more attention on the energy digital normally officer normally it's very very hard for a government officer to get such data he doesn't know how much electricity green electricity he doesn't know how many kilowatts the PVS so every month they call interpress if the government has a digital platform he can know every data at the real time he has co-operated with several governments and we open our data to them I think it's very important I totally agree and very much UK government's policy has presumed open all energy data our finale so for me a lot of you told good stories on that in particular whether you are facing a challenging time i.e. what you talked about in the 2000 you have to keep going you have to make the change happen or if it's a geographical challenge like in Kuwait where it's very hot because both of you or both of your governments could have decided to say well this is how it is economy doesn't allow it whether it doesn't allow it I think what I really admire in your stories is the fact that you actually did something about it so thank you and that's what this conference is all about thank you for that finale because it is about doing something about and really taking next steps tomorrow not the day after we've had huge range of different approaches all of which we all build the digital energy efficient system of the future from standards, engineering, behaviour change long-term policy really important hardware working with services and it's all empowered and enabled by digitalisation and never ever forget that the customer comes first thank you all so much fantastic panel and I think it's time for a break now thank you