The growing demand for electric power is being driven in particular by the drive to substitute fossil fuels with renewables: around 95 percent of the energy demands for global transport – cars, ships, aircraft – is currently still met with fossil fuels. For heating and cooling/refrigeration this share is around 75 percent. As part of the energy transition, these shares need to be increasingly replaced with green electricity. This alone will double global electricity demands in the next 20 years – and this estimate already includes all the beneficial effects to be expected from measures to improve energy efficiency. There needs to be a major push to expand and upgrade the power grids if this increasing demand is to be met.

Investments in innovations will pay off quickly. As well as converters and inverters, this affects the areas of load switching, measuring and controlling. Thanks to the high number of new, decentralized energy sources, the growing volatility and the ever increasing number of intermediate storage devices, many more such systems and operating resources will be required.

In the field of photovoltaics, the time period for a return on investment is around six to eight years in Europe and the USA. This corresponds to an interest rate of around eight percent on the capital market. Solar plants pay for themselves – all the while producing clean electricity. These rates of return will continue to attract capital investment in the future, which will provide long-term growth stimulus for photovoltaics.

Energy storage systems are a way out of the volatility mentioned above. At times when solar and wind power are both abundant, thermal and electrical devices are used to store the electricity produced, thus bridging times in the day when it is dark or there is no wind. Intelligently controlled batteries in electric cars play a particularly important role here, as they can act as both consumers and storage devices at the same time.