“By looking at the megacities of today, we can see what lies ahead for the power of tomorrow.”

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Why are megacities such a hot topic?

Because huge metrop­o­lis­es are the future. Accord­ing to the def­i­n­i­tion giv­en by the Unit­ed Nations, a megac­i­ty is a city with more than ten mil­lion inhab­i­tants. There are already 28 such cities, which have a com­bined pop­u­la­tion of almost half a bil­lion peo­ple. Today, around 55 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion live in urban areas—by 2050, this fig­ure will be two-thirds. By look­ing at exist­ing megac­i­ties, we can put them under the micro­scope and find out what lies ahead for future pow­er grids.

What are the greatest challenges for the power supply?

Work­ing togeth­er with a con­sul­tan­cy firm, we have con­duct­ed a study and worked out three cen­tral aspects. One par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant area is the con­cept of resilience. The strains placed on pow­er grids are increas­ing, so it is impor­tant that the ener­gy sup­ply does not col­lapse com­plete­ly each time a fault occurs. A smart net­work man­age­ment sys­tem which also allows net­works to be oper­at­ed specif­i­cal­ly in an over­load state will there­fore be essen­tial. How­ev­er, this will only work—and this is the sec­ond ele­men­tary find­ing of the study – with smart equip­ment.

50 per­cent of megac­i­ties are in Asia. This was one of the rea­sons why Hong Kong was select­ed as the venue for “TRANSFORM”.

For sup­pli­ers, it is of para­mount impor­tance that they under­stand the con­di­tion and there­fore the reli­a­bil­i­ty and avail­abil­i­ty of their equip­ment. The third aspect relates to effi­cien­cy: How can I trans­port elec­tric­i­ty to the megac­i­ties, prefer­ably with­out great expense and with min­i­mal loss­es? This is some­thing we also dis­cuss at TRANSFORM.

What is the situation regarding safety?

In dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed regions, haz­ard pre­ven­tion and envi­ron­men­tal aspects are nat­u­ral­ly a key con­cern. No one wants 300 met­ric tons of min­er­al oil to start burn­ing right in the mid­dle of a city. When we think about the trans­form­ers of tomor­row, we also have to take alter­na­tive insu­la­tion flu­ids into account.

How can a format like TRANSFORM contribute to finding answers and solutions to the major questions of the future?

One ele­ment of the con­fer­ence is the Inno­va­tion Lab where we work togeth­er with the vis­i­tors to fig­ure out what the trans­form­ers of tomor­row could look like based on the require­ments of the megac­i­ties. Past con­fer­ences have shown just how pro­duc­tive these meet­ings of about 400 indus­try experts can be. Real­world appli­ca­tions have already been devel­oped from the many ideas that have been dis­cussed there.

Can you give us an example?

ETOS, our sys­tem solu­tion for mon­i­tor­ing, reg­u­lat­ing, and dig­i­tal­iz­ing pow­er trans­form­ers. We pre­sent­ed the con­cept sim­ply as a vision at TRANSFORM in Vien­na back in 2015. Now it is already in use.