A trade fair is usually conceived of as an exhibition of manageable size, where some experts present very special products which are then critically examined by a moderate number of visitors. The Intersolar isn’t like that.

Instead, it is large, colourful, aimed at both consumers and professionals, and offers a host of interesting products and services from the entire energy industry, as the original solar show has now been expanded to include energy storage, electromobility and charging infrastructure.

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Intersolar Europe is – according to the organiser – “the world’s leading trade fair for the solar industry and its partners”. A few years ago, when the steady growth of the industry gave way to a wave of bankruptcies, Solar Promotion, the organiser of this event, was looking for new topics that could absorb the decline in exhibitor and visitor numbers. They were found both in electric mobility and in energy storage. The team led by Managing Director Markus Elsässer thus initially integrated battery technology as well as power-to-gas and later also electric cars and charging stations.

The Pforzheim-based event company created “The smarter E Europe” from this quad-constellation. Behind this somewhat cumbersome term today are the Intersolar Europe, electrical energy storage Europe (ees), Power2Drive Europe (p2d) and EM-Power. This time, they came together in ten exhibition halls at the Munich Exhibition Centre, with a total of 1,354 exhibitors (2018: 1,172) and 100,000 m² with 50,000 visitors. There were 250 presenting institutions at the ees trade fair alone.

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As in the previous year, there was a special area in Hall C2 where mainly the H₂ and FC companies, which were already represented at many energy trade fairs, gathered – right next to the Tesla stand. Companies such as Siqens were also present, in this case at the Bayern-innovativ stand. The Southern German company, which has now grown to 22 employees, presented a commercially available, self-sufficient energy supply unit that has a high-temperature fuel cell but uses methanol instead of hydrogen as an energy storage medium.

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read more in H2-international July 2019