IRENA Innovation Day in Türkiye
IRENA Innovation Days: Solutions for a renewable-powered future
IRENA’s Innovation Days take place in different regions around the world and aim to connect innovators and policy makers. This series of events aims to showcase emerging innovations and inform and inspire broader and faster uptake of innovative solutions that can help deliver a renewable-powered future. Innovation Days build on IRENA’s biennial Innovation Week events but focus on the particular needs and experiences of groups of countries. To date Innovation Days have been held in Uruguay in July 2019 and Thailand in September 2019, with new editions coming up in 2020 together with the IRENA Innovation Week in September 2020 taking place in Bonn.
IRENA Innovation Day: Türkiye, 27th November 2019
The third Innovation Day took place on 27 November 2019 in Ankara and focused on Türkiye and neighbouring countries but was open to attendees from all IRENA countries. The event was co-organised with SHURA Energy Transition Centre, and received support from the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources of Türkiye.
The event brought together a diverse mix of policy makers and innovative companies from Türkiye, from neighbouring countries, as well as from further afield, and offered local country representatives and companies the opportunity to showcase successes, highlight challenges, learn from each other’s experience and explore how innovative solutions can help meet national energy system’s needs. For countries and companies from further afield, this event provided the opportunity to meet key local actors, to showcase work and to learn from the experience of countries in the local region.
Discussions drew on the experiences of local and international governments and innovative companies as well as on the global insights captured in IRENA’s 2019 reports Innovation landscape for a renewable-powered future and Innovation Outlook: Smart charging for electric vehicles.
The event was opened with three keynote speeches from Prof Dr Seret Kalayci, the Deputy Minister of Energy and Natural Resources of Türkiye, Mr Selahattin Hakman, the Chair of Steering Committee of SHURA Energy Transition Centre and Dr Dolf Gielen, the Director of IRENA’s Innovation and Technology Centre. High level speakers outlined the global vision and objectives for the energy transition, as well as the ambition of Türkiye to increase their deployment of wind and solar renewable energy from current 10% to higher shares to decarbonise its power as well as its end-use sectors, while creating opportunities for the economy through business models and enabling frameworks. Keynote speeches emphasized that innovations across power sector will continue to play a crucial role and a systemic approach to innovations will be key to deliver impactful solutions.
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Session 1: Digital solutions to engage consumers
Discussions explored how digitalisation-enabled business models engage consumers and in turn enable integration of higher shares of variable renewables, whilst providing flexibility to the power system.
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Session 2: Solutions to electrify transport sector
Discussions examined potential of electromobility to unleash synergies between clean transport and renewable electricity and a particular role of smart charging to enable higher integration of renewables into the power systems while unlocking flexibility.
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Session 3: DSO 2.0
Discussions delved into future business models and innovative solutions for distribution system operators (DSOs) in the evolving power system model characterized by increased integration of variable renewable energy resources and scaled-up deployment scaled-up of distributed energy resources.
For further information on speakers and highlights from the discussions, please consult a summary report above, while presentation slides can be accessed here and pictures here.