Ensuring efficient and highly reliable energy supply in an environmentally compatible and economically viable manner is of utmost importance to a modern society and its prosperous future development. Outstanding controllability, flexibility and versatility, clearly identifies electrical energy as a key enabler and research vector in this area. There, large scale integration of distributed and clean but statistically fluctuating renewable sources into the existing complex infrastructure will be one of the huge challenges and will heavily rely on novel solutions for energy storage, transmission, and power electronic conversion as well as on an immediate parallelism of energy and information flow. Fascinatingly, this could transform today’s mostly unidirectional and passive electricity networks into a highly interactive, highly dynamic, self optimizing power grid providing outstanding energy security and a wide variety of energy related services to modern economy.

The Workshop will give an overview of latest high power electronics and high power semiconductor technologies and will discuss research initiatives and visions of leading universities and research centers including the US NSF Sponsored FREEDM Systems ERC, the E.ON ERC and the EU UNIFLEX-PM research group. Accordingly, bright new horizons of research and potentially transformative technologies to be implemented in future industry systems will be identified. 

The seminar is organized by Prof. Dr. J.W. Kolar and Dr. J. Biela (both ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and Dr. M. Weinhold, Siemens Energy Sector.

All presentations and discussions will be in Eng­lish.