Programme
Wednesday 10th December
Thursday 11th December
Friday 12th December

Marc Florette
Research and Innovation Vice President, GDF SUEZ

Since the first two International Conferences held in 2004 (Brussels, Belgium) and in 2006 (Napa Valley, USA), the Spring 2007 European Energy Council has set very ambitious targets for the European Union to be met by 2020:
• A commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% when compared to the 1990 levels;
• A binding target of 20% of total energy consumption being renewable energy (7% in 2007), resulting in 35%-45% of power generation coming from renewable according to the lastest European prospective scenarios;
• An urgent need to increase energy efficiency in the EU in order to reduce by 20% the EU’s energy consumption projected for 2020.
With higher and higher fossil fuel prices, this political roadmap provide the context for Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Indeed, many of the renewable energy sources are distributed, including new energy efficiency solutions such as combined generation of heat and power.

The Third International Conference on Renewable and DER integration is to be held in Nice in December 2008. It will address technical, market, and regulatory issues as a prerequisite to prepare massive DER integration into power grids, thus leaning on a continuous dialogue between all the
involved players. The conference will gather scientists, utility operators, manufacturers, regulators, and policy makers.

The Conference is organized in partnership with the EC supported EU-DEEP project coordinated by GDF SUEZ and the IRED Cluster coordinated by ISET. During these three days, the floor is given to experts and program managers from Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific regions, in order to debate about the hottest DER integration issues.

On the first day, the results reached by recent large scale integration experiments will be reviewed: participants will be able to build their own opinion on documented results, since comparing fi eld outputs from Europe, North America, Japan and Australia

On the second day, academia, utilities, and technology manufacturers, will be presenting their most recent research and development results in support of massive DER integration scenarios by 2010 and beyond. The sessions will cover technical, market, and regulatory issues.

On the third day, the floor will be given to researchers, in order to pinpoint future research areas to be covered beyond 2010, including active network management, virtual power plants, and ICT uses such as smart metering.

Attendees are invited to take an active part into this international event, located in the city of Nice, at the heart of the French Riviera.