MES 2018 Travelling Conference
International Conference: MicroPerspectives for Decentralized Energy Supply
Regional Opportunities in South East Asia

How bottom up energy transition and energy access metrics can contribute to human-centered product design and business development?

February 20-25, 2018
Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines.

It consists of 1-day Workshop in each of the countries.

Background:

The MES 2018 Travelling Conference is funded by BMBF and initiated by the Microenergy Systems (MES) Research Group at TU Berlin. The MES Research Group was launched in 2003 by a group of researchers and practitioners from TU Berlin, GIZ and MicroEnergy International. Since then, many research and educational activities were carried out, including a postgraduate school. The MES Research Group also organizes yearly MES conferences since 2009. Previous conferences took place in Germany, US, India and Colombia.

During the MES 2018 Travelling Conference experts and researchers of German companies and institutions are going to present and discuss their current research and development topics and interest in bottom up energy transition with potential academic and practice counterparts in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The conference will be an important milestone in the roadmap towards establishing the exchange of knowledge and strengthening existing and/or potential scientific collaboration between Germany and the South-East Asia region in the field of climate change, bottom up global energy transition, energy access and energy transition metrics, human-centered product design and social business development. Furthermore, the Conference would like to replicate and implement the “Mikroklima” concept initiated by the TU Berlin and aims at practically implementing research projects around climate change issues on the micro-level and bringing it into practice. Currently, “Mikroklima” has been implemented in Central Asia and West Africa.

The overall aim of the conference is to explore energy systems in the context of a bottom up global energy transition. The focus lies on the micro perspective and therefore takes into account particularly the needs and the contribution opportunities of households and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s) towards a sustainable global energy transition.

The Conference consists of a series of workshops with interactive sessions and round table discussions, as well as field visits to local installations and end-users. As for the participants from the German institutions, TU Berlin will send 6 researchers and 1 researcher from Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy.

Objectives of the conference:

• To provide a platform for the development of international cooperation and of a joint research agenda
• To bring together experience and results from research and implementation projects in a regional network and make it accessible to global, regional and local actors
• To enable a fast transfer of research results into entrepreneurial and social impact and to support the development of new business models and make appropriate tools available
• To establish long-term partnerships between scientific actors in Germany and South East Asia, to implement among other the “Mikroklima” concept locally and regionally and share their insights and results with the global “Mikroklima” network.
• To promote a tool such as Multi-Tier Framework to support bottom up energy transition

The first workshop of the Travelling Conference is jointly organised with the SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC) at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). 

The SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC) is a world premier scholarly hub for technologically-intensive design science, research and practice. It is a multi-million dollar centre based both in Singapore at SUTD, and in Cambridge, MA, USA at MIT, with academic and industrial partners from around the world. IDC faculty, researchers and students work together to design devices, products, systems, services and the built environment that address strategic needs of Singapore, the greater Asian region, the US, and the global community. At the same time, the IDC studies and advances the design process and design science, seeking to develop new tools and methods for design practice and education.