At the end of September 2017, the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology and Swiss consulting firm E4tech held a forum on how to transform the energy industry through sector integration. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss the legal, financial and technical barriers to greater interaction between energy sectors, determined prior to the event through an analysis of possibly interrelated factors, and to come up with solutions. The proposed strategy focuses on pushing forward short- and long-term measures that will have an impact on the market and the industry during the upcoming legislative period.
The authors of the study presented at the conference maintained that the best path to change “does not lie in the radical electrification of the heat and transportation sectors or in switching all industries over to hydrogen as the sole energy carrier, but rather in a sensible merger of the two technologies, taking into account efficiency and sustainability.” They stressed that the key to achieving the clean energy transformation was this integration of markets, which required cooperation at all levels, and that it was time to start taking measurable steps toward it.
