Brief pro­file

The Fach­hochschule West­küste — Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences — in Hei­de in 2018 formed the Insti­tute for the Trans­for­ma­tion of the Ener­gy Sys­tem (ITE), con­cen­trat­ing its exper­tise in the ener­gy tran­si­tion in a way con­ducive to work on inter­dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lem-solv­ing in par­tic­u­lar. Six chairs have been cre­at­ed to rep­re­sent the spe­cial­ist fields of sec­tor cou­pling, build­ing ser­vices engi­neer­ing, net­work inte­gra­tion, ener­gy tran­si­tion law and busi­ness & soci­ety. In a project des­ig­nat­ed Campus100, the devel­op­ment of the Insti­tute and of a tech­nol­o­gy cen­tre is being fund­ed by the state gov­ern­ment to the tune of 3.2 mil­lion euros from the Euro­pean Region­al Devel­op­ment Fund. The uni­ver­si­ty also offers two cours­es focused specif­i­cal­ly on the ener­gy tran­si­tion: a bachelor’s degree in envi­ron­men­tal­ly-friend­ly build­ing sys­tems engi­neer­ing and a master’s in green energy.

Activ­i­ties in the real-world laboratory

In the con­text of the project, the ITE will be con­cen­trat­ing on over­all sys­tem inte­gra­tion and the socio-eco­nom­ic issues. Over­all sys­tem inte­gra­tion means that, beyond the con­ven­tion­al sup­ply chain, dif­fer­ent indus­tri­al busi­ness­es will now be required to work togeth­er in a cycli­cal sys­tem, while at the same time ensur­ing that their mate­r­i­al flows are reg­u­lat­ed to match each oth­er and meet mar­ket needs. This pos­es new tech­no­log­i­cal and busi­ness chal­lenges in terms of resource plan­ning and approach­es to coop­er­a­tion at man­age­ment lev­el. The ITE’s work in this con­nec­tion will focus on help­ing to devel­op the scal­ing con­cept and – as a neu­tral play­er – to elab­o­rate bal­anced busi­ness models.