The Leonardo ENERGY initiative

The global community for sustainable energy professionals

The Leonardo ENERGY initiative (LE) provides professionals and regulators with broad expertise on sustainable energy.  At its origin was the European copper industry’s long-term vision that the rate of future demand growth for its products would be strongly related to energy sustainability.

Copper has two major performance characteristics that make it an indispensable material for a sustainable energy economy – it is 100% recyclable and it has a very high conductivity. The construction of renewable energy systems and the manufacturing of energy efficient motors, transformers, and cables depend highly on these favourable characteristics. This insight, combined with the understanding that today’s energy systems will not make it through to the next century, are at the basis of Leonardo ENERGY. The aim is to accelerate the transition towards a sustainable energy economy, with a carbon-free society being the ultimate goal.

Sustainability in every meaning of the word

LE interprets the term “sustainable” in a broad sense. It is not just about preserving the environment by using renewable energy and recyclable materials; it’s also about incorporating social and economic aspects. Providing technology-assisted living for the elderly, ensuring increased electrical safety in old homes, and avoiding the economic losses of power dips and interruptions, are also part of a sustainable society. The LE initiative is active in five major domains: energy efficiency, renewable energy systems, power quality, electrical safety, and the home of the future.

The right mix of education, training and advocacy

LE has a strongly intertwined, two-pronged approach to help reach its goal: the education of professionals and advocacy towards regulatory and standardisation bodies. New standards and regulations will not succeed if they are not supported by the majority of professionals in the field. Consequently, professionals must have easy access to the knowledge required to prepare the market for regulatory changes. Their continued training and education is then indispensible to ensure that the new regulations are properly implemented.

To support this, LE provides entire e-learning paths, subject specific webinars, a comprehensive library containing everything from generalist white papers to technical application notes, and blogs that facilitate discussion on various energy topics. These tools and documents are freely accessible from every corner of the world, and are accessed daily by more than 2,000 users across 180 countries.

A global and systems perspective

One of LE’s core strengths is the systems perspective used to address both strategic and technical issues. The energy system is too complex for a “sum of partial solutions” approach and so every solution needs to help the system as a whole. LE also maintains a healthy balance between global and local concerns, which is not always an easy task. Finally, LE believes that strategic thinking must go hand-in-hand with in-depth technical knowledge. The strategic level cannot ignore hard technical facts from the field. At the same time, the field cannot ignore that the sheer scale of the energy challenge requires strong strategic and regulatory frameworks.

One Response to “The Leonardo ENERGY initiative”

		Eurocopper
		14th April 2011
		[...] Leonardo ENERGY initiative is supported by many partners from across the industrial value chain and academia. It offers a [...]