Interview with
Jörg Scheer, Managing Director HARTING Customised Solutions
All Electric Society and cabling solutions - does the one have anything to do with the other?
Climate change, and with it advancing global warming, has not only set in, but is actually accelerating. There is now a consensus on this between science, politics, business and society. We must all contribute to halting this negative trend. The fact that the world's population is continuing to grow at the same time, thereby increasing the consumption of resources and energy, makes this challenge all the more daunting.
The United Nations' seventeen Sustainable Development Goals came into force in January 2016. The All Electric Society is one of the technological solutions geared to making the aspirations of the United Nations a reality. Put in a nutshell, I would describe the All Electric Society as follows: Everything that can be electrified will be electrified. There are already enough examples of this: Electric automobiles are replacing the combustion engine, while heat pumps are replacing heating systems using fossil fuels.
The energy required for this must be clean and green, being generated, for example, by wind and solar power, hydropower or biomass. This energy will then be transported via intelligent electricity grids and - where appropriate - also via hydrogen as a transport and storage medium. The use of energy must be as efficient as conceivably possible and this is where so-called sector coupling enters the picture. Ideally, this represents an end-to-end physical electricity grid connection between individual sectors such as industry, transport and building infrastructure and their intelligent management.
In addition to the purely physical networking of the electricity grid, the consumers, systems, etc. must be digitalised accordingly, meaning that they must be capable of communicating. This is the only way to request and transmit the required energy and the relevant status in real time.
A digital infrastructure must therefore also be created between the assets. When everything has been electrified, everything digitalised and everything networked, then we are talking about the All Electric Society. Its maximum expression is a vision that is also being thwarted by many national self-interests. Nevertheless, the basic idea remains the right one – and even if the process of electrifying, digitalising and networking is initially only started within one country and one sector.
HARTING is also making a contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals of the UN and the All Electric Society. Plain and simple: Connecting the All Electric Society!
The world is becoming more electric and this entails transmitting electricity consumers. For this purpose, meanwhile cables have been connected to consumers for a century. This can be executed directly by way of fixed connections or more conveniently and in a more modular way via plug connectors, with which we are supporting the All Electric Society. In addition to connectors themselves, we also offer complete cabling solutions for certain applications, such as robots. Every electrified asset will also be digitised in future so that it can be networked on the data side. We have a large portfolio of data connectors for this purpose and supply a corresponding pre-assembled range of cabling for all these interfaces. Single Pair Ethernet is one technology for networking assets that currently does not have a data interface – and HARTING is also driving things forward here.
In order to pursue the bigger picture goals, we have to connect the topics in detail, electrically and in terms of data. Harting is making its contributions here - pluggable as well as with cables.
