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Energy takes center stage during the second session of the MIT Conference

As part of the fifth edition of the Tech Summer Sessions taking place in Barcelona until early July, yesterday, June 15, the two-day-long MIT Conference came to a close. The second day of the meeting consisted of an intense session centered on the major Catalan as well as international technological projects in the fields of energy, water and transport. Apart from these three themes, the protagonist of the day, both in terms of the challenges it presents and its transversal characteristics, was the theme of technological developments in the field of energy. The Catalan Councilor for Innovation, Universities and Business Josep Huguet was in charge of bringing down the curtain on the MIT Conference.

Octavi Planells, Clara Cardona | 16 june de 2010

Huguet stressed the relevance of the Tech Summer Sessions (TSS) in the development of Catalonia’s Research and Innovation Plan 2010-2013. The councilor said that through the debate on these three main themes (Energy, Water and Transport), the TSS directly promotes three of 17 areas of excellence the Plan focuses on while touching on some others such as intelligent cities and the fight against climate change. These challenges will be addressed intensively when the future Besòs Diagonal Campus is complete. The TSS were originally organized five years ago by the Foundation b_TEC in order to jumpstart the work of the future Campus. Miquel Barceló, president of the Foundation b_TEC, also stressed the importance of the conferece to compare the state-of-the-art advances in energy, water and transport made by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Catalan researchers.

In the second session of the MIT Conference, the highlight was the involvement of Frank Briscoe, director of Fusion for Energy, the Barcelona-based agency to coordinate European participation in the construction of the ITER nuclear fusion reactor. Briscoe indicated at what point research into fusion energy currently stands 80 years after the discovery of how to the Sun “works” (fusion energy is what fuels our nearest star). Fusion is a source of enormous potential energy, but it is technically very difficult to achieve because it requires an immense amount of heat and energy to produce. However, Briscoe emphasized the qualitative leap achieved in the last 30 years. “Fusion research has advanced considerably and now stands on the edge of the conditions needed to produce a reaction,” he said.

The construction of ITER also opens a huge range of possibilities for innovative horizons to expand since it requires the development of new technologies in all areas to be implemented in the reactor, said Briscoe, who was seconded by Ramon Garriga, director of the Energy Park of the Foundation b_TEC. For Garriga, ITER is a success regardless of what happens in the future even in the case of failure to achieve the expected results. “The technological advances that our industries will become involved in through this project represents a success story for them,” he said. In this regard, Garriga cited that the 36% of the companies that participated in the design of the Large Hadron Collider were small or medium-sized businesses that thanks to the project became leaders in their sectors. ITER is therefore “an extraordinary opportunity to participate in a project of high technology in many industrial areas.”

Throughout the day, representatives of different technological research centers involved in the project of the Diagonal-Besòs Campus, along with other entities, presented their work. The issue which drew the most emphasis, perhaps because of its wide-reaching effects, was energy. Antoni Martínez, Director of the Catalan Institute for Energy Research (Department of Electronic Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), spoke of the InnoEnergy KIC initiative, which he forms part of, and its insistence that the European Union create a stable and competitive community of innovation and knowledge in the field of renewable energy development. Bordonau clarified that “this is not a research project,” but an alliance that will link the three pillars of knowledge: education, research and innovation. The initiative will have a corporate structure, will be established as a European company based in Brussels and will be operational in July this year. According to the expert, the initiative aims to “cover the concept of ‘mixed energy’ to meet the demanding challenges of European society in terms of supply and inflicting the minimal impact on the climate.” Geographically, the initiative has six operational centers, including the three poles of knowledge mentioned above and which, in the case of Iberian core, include the UPC, ESADE, Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, CIEMAT and IREC.

The second session of the MIT Conference also included, among other papers, a summary of the three workshops on energy, water (mainly focused on the desalination of seawater and brackish) and transport (which dealt with all the development and implementation of the electric car) that took place on Monday. Despite the diversity of the topics covered in each one, the three workshops agreed on the need to continue working to improve energy efficiency through research and development in these three fields and that these factors open the door to new business opportunities. The TSS is now taking a break to pursue more in-depth seminars that will take place during Energy Week from June 28 to July 2.

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