Conference on Energy Informatics

Media notice

Electricity meters which select the most low-cost green power provider on a daily basis, smartphones which regulate heaters to save energy, electric cars which store renewable energy, as well as combined heat and power generation plants which mutually trade at the energy exchange. What sounds innovative will be commonplace by 2050. Today, the threatening increase in the demand of imported electricity, potentially hazardous power sources, rising costs for fossil energy and climate policy pose new challenges for research, industries and politics and serve as a catalyst for innovation on national and international levels. Both the UN's Kyoto Protocol and the EU's Strategic Energy Technology Plan have paved the way for a sustainable and efficient energy strategy. In Switzerland, the federal government's "Energy Strategy 2050" dispatch has demanded a successive pullout from the production of nuclear energy and has turned towards the use of renewable energy sources.

The ambitious energy policy goals can only be achieved by the use of modern information and communication technology. Applications include the integration of renewable energy sources, a framework of intelligent power and distribution networks (i.e. smart grids) as well as increased energy efficiency in production, transportation and households. Energy informatics forms an indispensable tie between technology on the one hand and the market, processes and consumer behavior on the other.

The renowned external page Conference on Energy Informatics is one of the hubs of the energy informatics community, involving research institutions and companies from Germany, Austria and Switzerland:

Thursday, November 13 - Friday, November 14, 2014
ETH Zurich, Building HIT, Room E51, Hoenggerberg, 8093 Zurich

Highlights of the conference include:

• "Cyber Security and the Grid" keynote by Dr. Markus Brändle, head of ABB's cyber security division
• Presentation of future energy services by cleantech startups
• Extensive insight into avant-garde energy systems
• Newest research results of high impact for industry and households
  

Hosting the conference in Switzerland is a premiere: after venues in Oldenburg (Germany) and Vienna (Austria), it will be held from November 13-14, 2014 at ETH Zurich. The conference is organized by Thorsten Staake, senior researcher at ETH and professor for energy efficient systems at the University of Bamberg. Prof. Friedemann Mattern, head of the Distributed Systems Group of the Computer Science Department at ETH, is a member of the program committee. With partners reaching from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the Swiss Informatics Society, German and Austrian governmental departments, the conference unites academic, commercial and political bodies to showcase and discuss state-of-the-art solutions on the leading edge of energy informatics technology.

For more information, please see the external page full conference program.