The power of knowledge for a clean energy future

This year the Enel Foundation hosted the 6th edition of Enel’s annual meeting with Academic Partners under the framework of the World Energy for Universities (We4U) program, the Enel Group’s Academic Partnership Program aimed at fostering a constant and multidisciplinary dialogue with universities and research institutes that focuses on the challenges posed by the energy transition.

The 2022 edition of the We4U annual meeting highlighted some of the key aspects of fighting climate change and focused on working together on mitigation and adaptation. During the event, the fruitful discussions among representatives of our academic partners, subject-matter experts and representatives of the Enel Group identified a set of specific challenges that could be solved through collaboration between the corporate and academic worlds.

The three challenges are:

• Solutions for development of long-term contracts for electricity from renewables
• Grid resilience for extreme weather events
• Solutions to improve and speed up Operations & Maintenance (O&M) of charging infrastructure
  
  

Be an active player in the fight against climate change and propose your solution!

In the last 20 years, an unprecedented number of extreme climate events have occurred due to climate change. These extreme events put the stability of distribution grids at risk, causing an interruption of service to our customers.

Enel Grids is looking for innovative solutions to deal with these climate occurrences while continuing to guarantee a valuable service and sustain the energy transition.

Today’s complex geopolitical scenario is putting the energy market under pressure and is reflected in the high volatility of energy prices. In this scenario, the adoption of long-term contracts is limited by the outlook of prices in medium- to long-term horizons; in addition, there are other non-economic obstacles that disadvantage long-term contracts in the power market.

The EU should focus on structural measures and the provision of long-term price signals as a solution to mitigate spiraling prices.

As the number of electric vehicles and EV customers increases, there is a need for charging infrastructure operators to provide increasingly excellent service. In fact, the charging network is becoming a critical infrastructure that must demonstrate reliability closer and closer to 100% without having any service interruptions that may undermine the perceived value to customers.

Enel X Way is looking for innovative solutions to optimize charging infrastructure maintenance, speeding up the operation and helping operators to find the best solutions to solve technical problems as quickly as possible.

We want to associate each technical issue that occurs in our charging infrastructure with a possible solution, using image and video processing tools or similar tools that are able to recognize the most common problems, and link each one to a specific page in the O&M manual or a common resolution procedure.

This group of challenges contributes to the following sustainable development goals (SDGs) to transform our world:

• SDGs 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
• SDGs 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
• SDG 13: Climate Action. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.