Heinz Nowicki

"For me, designing the future of energy at Bender means developing into a system partner for safety technology and energy and shifting our focus from managing energy to shaping it. This is a huge task that we are already successfully tackling in a variety of applications.

In terms of products, we have taken a mostly passive approach up to now: We monitor power supplies and detect, visualise and report faults. In the future, we will go one step further in this area by using sensor data to provide recommended courses of action via AI and to actively execute them. This will enable us to avoid system failures or to help companies improve their CO2 balance.

This consideration leads us on to another important aspect: With our solutions for large-scale PV installations, wind power plants and hydrogen applications, we already play a significant role in the development of sustainable and future-proof energies. We will continue to advance these activities and develop intelligent solutions for future improvements to using and conserving energy.

We also use the opportunities provided by predictive maintenance, digital twins and AI-based solutions to support companies when it comes to decarbonisation. As an example, let’s take a motor that can also be operated at reduced speed with a certain load. If we determine the corresponding values and evaluate them intelligently, we can automatically reduce the speed and thus also reduce the energy requirement.

As this example shows, instead of passively collecting sensor data, we actively shape the use of electric energy, help to make the right decisions and therefore derive suitable courses of action at an early stage. The result: companies improve their productivity, increase their operational reliability and achieve a better CO2 balance. Such achievements can secure an important competitive advantage for companies such as suppliers to the automotive industry. Given that vehicle manufacturers are under pressure to introduce decarbonisation measures and apply this pressure directly to their supply chains, companies that are successful in this area can secure market access, while others lose their supply contracts

Another important aspect to consider is the fact that the future of energy will not develop at the same pace in all industries and regions. Although the same concepts are generally in place worldwide, the concrete needsneed and the technical, normative and economic requirements are different in the Asia-Pacific region than in North America and yet again different in Europe than in Latin America.

Our newly established hubs and platform-based developments will allow us to fulfil the different regional requirements even more successfully in the future. Our international teams of experts, for example, can offer systems and services optimised to meet regional demands based on the same shared hardware

Here at Bender, the future of energy is also about being able to install and activate updates or additional features over-the-air. As a result, a device equipped with basic functions can be gradually extended to become a holistic system. Integrating a sensor into the cloud and combining int with AI solutions can enable it to perform new tasks such as generating automatic evaluations and protocols for quality or energy audits or maybe even go one step further by independently implementing changes to the configuration of the electrical system.

Of course, such aspirations are very forward-looking indeed, and we are well aware that there is a lot to do before we reach this point. After all, all these applications need to be completely safe, not only with regard to unauthorised access to systems but also in terms of responsibility for activities in the power supply that take place automatically. We are therefore taking a step-by-step approach to develop and shape the future of energy both intelligently and safely."