The GREAT Energy Summit showed Britain at its innovative best

The curtain has just fallen on the GREAT Energy Summit, one of our major events of the year in Central & Eastern Europe (CEE). This year, as I wrote earlier in the week, the Summit was in Warsaw, so I saw at first hand the amount of work that went into making it such a success. I am hugely proud of my own team, and those across the region, who were responsible for delivering the event. Their months of preparation paid off handsomely.

There was one aspect of the Summit that I did not mention in my previous post, so would like to dwell on now: the GREAT Innovation Showcase. For those of you who have not seen it, the Showcase is an exhibition of recent, high-impact British innovation. It was developed in response to independent research, commissioned in 2014, on perceptions of the UK amongst policy-makers and the business community in Poland and other CEE countries. One of the standout conclusions was that, despite the fact that Britain was then – and still is – ranked the second most innovative country in the world, the UK was not perceived as being a particularly innovative nation by decision-makers. This was acting as a barrier to innovative British companies doing business in Poland and the region as a whole.

The Showcase made its first appearance last year, and has appeared at many of our events across CEE since then. The Showcase is constantly evolving to reflect the fact that innovation does not stand still, and four new exhibits were added to the Showcase for the Energy Summit:

First, OC Robotics presented its snake-arm robot, which is designed to work in hazardous places, like nuclear reactors, where it is impossible or too dangerous for humans to work. The robot is operated through an Xbox controller – Amber Rudd, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, drove it for a few minutes! – but the simplicity of the user interface should not blind us to the sophistication of this amazing piece of technology.

Second, VTOL Technologies, a company based at the University of Reading, showed the Summit its ‘Flying Wing’, a step change in drone technology.  The Flying Wing is an advanced aerofoil which has been developed for monitoring pipelines and other network-based energy infrastructure. Its official launch is scheduled for the Farnborough International Airshow in July 2016.

Third, Highview Power Storage used a 3D printed model of a power plant to help explain its Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) technology. Highview has been awarded funding from the Department of Energy and Climate Change to build a 5MW pre-commercial LAES technology demonstrator at Pilsworth Landfill facility in Greater Manchester. The project is expected to be operational in the first half of this year.

Finally, Neill Ricketts, the CEO of Versarien, gave us an insight into how graphene is set to transform the energy sector – and many other areas of our lives. He focused on two current Versarien projects: a project being run in partnership with WMG, part of Warwick University, to use graphene to enhance batteries by making them lighter, more durable, and more suitable for high capacity energy storage, and a second, funded by Innovate UK, which has successfully integrated graphene into solid state dye-sensitised photovoltaic cells to improve power conversion efficiency and cell durability.

No one in the room can have left with any doubt about two things: Britain really is a world leader in innovation, and the UK is producing innovations which will have a significant impact on people’s daily lives in Central & Eastern Europe.