WEC AUSTRIA WELCOMES 65 NEW YEP IN THE 4TH CYCLE

The kick-off event for the 4th cycle of the “Young Energy Professionals (YEP)” programme and the associated future workshop took place on April 5th,  2023 from 10 am to 3 pm at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber in Vienna.

At the beginning, the Managing Director of the World Energy Council Austria, Dr. Robert Kobau, welcomed the 65 participants of the YEP programme, followed by a short round of introductions.

As an introduction to the “Future Workshop”, Ass.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Günter Getzinger from the Science, Technology and Society Unit of the Graz University of Technology gave a keynote speech on “The Future of the Energy Industry”.

Jürgen Suschek-Berger then presented the programme and the method of the “Future Workshop”. Suschek-Berger explained that the method of the “Future Workshop” goes back to Robert Jungk, who created a forum for the participation of non-experts in a wide variety of topics. The so-called “Future Workshop” is characterised by three phases:

• In the first phase, the critique phase, the aim is to criticise the current state of the chosen and treated topic area and not to disregard oneself in the process. Any criticism is allowed and is recorded.
• The second phase, called the fantasy or utopia phase, is about giving completely free rein to fantastic and utopian ideas, thoughts and proposals on the chosen topics. All ideas are allowed, the only thing that is not allowed is criticism of proposals put forward.
• In the last of the three phases of the “Future Workshop”, the realisation and implementation phase, the aim is to develop possibilities from the first two phases as to which of the ideas envisaged could realistically be implemented in which period of time (medium or long term) and which preconditions would have to be created for this. The end is the beginning of something new.

In the further course of the event, the working groups on the individual topics were constituted, these are:

1.	Electromobility, coordinator: Otto Rezac
2.	Energy suppliers as partners of companies – climate neutrality, coordinator: Dietmar Fischer
3.	Batteries, coordinator: Stefan Dür
4.	Climate neutrality as a corporate goal (and sustainability reporting), coordinators: Gerhild Scheiber/Ralph Gasser
5.	Heat transition – decarbonisation, coordinator: Maria Mironova
6.	Grids, coordinator: Marenah Seido
7.	Energy education, coordinator: Helwin Prohaska
8.	Electricity market model, coordinator: Helena Farmer
9.	Stakeholder analysis, coordinator: Victoria Haubenwaller