2024: The year of flexibility?

This year’s E-world took place at a time when Europe's energy landscape underwent a rapid transformation, with the enormous systemic challenges of integrating renewable generation. With less conventional energy generation in the mix, balancing a grid by matching supply and demand moment to moment is becoming an ever more difficult task for grid operators. However, traders also have more difficulty adapting to these changing market conditions.

This is why flexibility and distributed energy resources (DERs) emerged as dominant topics of conversation throughout this year’s E-world event. It was encouraging to witness such widespread recognition that demand-side participation, virtual power plants, and other flexible solutions will be essential for reliably balancing fluctuating renewable supply. To meet these needs, our Energy Market of Things (EMoT) facilitates the automated aggregation and optimization of consumer load, storage, and other distributed assets like batteries, EVs, and demand management for trading across multiple electricity markets.

And we can see digitalization efforts happening all across the board to offer solid solutions to all these new challenges the industry is facing. Nobody that we talked to at E-world would disagree with that - but digitalization also brings its pitfalls that need to be addressed - we’re talking about cyber attacks (especially on critical infrastructure like our power supply.)

This reality formed the backdrop for insightful presentations at E-world 2024, like the one by our Business Development Lead Mike Coulten. In his talk, Mike delved into the topic of cybercrime, emphasizing how state-sponsored and financially-motivated hackers have increasingly set their sights on energy assets. He outlined the limitations of purely reactive security measures and described risk advisory services that can create a firewall against these attacks. These help clients understand vulnerabilities, prioritize mitigations, and develop response plans integrated with monitoring and automation solutions.

At the same time, heightened geopolitical tensions and market volatility underscore energy security's importance now more than ever. But as Mike outlined, today's critical infrastructure remains vulnerable to persistent cyber threats that could destabilize supplies. Holistic solutions are needed to comprehensively assess risks, prioritize defenses, and facilitate rapid response capabilities.

While talking about all things cybersecurity, DERs, and energy trading, at this year’s E-world, we were happy to have made valuable connections across our expanded international business development team, representing our UK, Austrian, and Estonian offices. Dozens stopped by the Navitasoft booth daily for product demos and engaging conversations. And as always, our traditional Hungarian wine reception on Tuesday evening was the perfect way to unwind, catch up with friends, new and old, and share ideas on the road ahead. For now, we only look forward to following up with all the great people we talked to.

About E-world 2024

As the energy industry’s most prominent fair, this year’s E-world spanned over 200,000 square meters of exhibition space and hosted more than 900 exhibitors showcasing their latest products, services, and innovations from over 30 countries. It was a grand opportunity for all participants to get updated on the latest technology advancements and strengthen relationships that will help power Europe's clean energy transition - and we were more than happy to have been in the middle of it.

Naturally, the geopolitical turmoil and market volatility sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine remained in many minds. While gas prices have stabilized from last summer's peaks, ongoing debates underscored Europe's imperative to diversify fuels and accelerate the energy transition. At E-world, the solutions on display pointed to a future with smarter grids, universal electrification, and batteries complementing variable wind and solar generation at all scales.