On July 7, 2019, the learning part of the Virtual Academy within the project of Youth Day: Energy Challange was completed. The last fifth module was devoted to the topic of “Sustainable energy transition“. The European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), represented by senior lecturer Christoph Burger and Program Director Jens Weinmann, moderated and developed the training materials and assignments.

ESMT is one of the key partners of the project. Twice they held the workshops during the Youth Day of the St. Petersburg International Gas Forum. Their business games had always a great success among the participants.

The fifth module included three webinars:

• June 24 Christoph Burger and Jens Weinmann told about the Trends in decentralization and digitalization and the role of gas. Webinar held in a form of a quiz, where the participants were able to test their knowledge and learn about capacity additions, storage alternatives, technological learning curves, smart meters, the role of transportation up to CO2 pricing and emissions.

• June 25 Christoph and Jens continued their dialogue with the students, this time on New business models in the phases of energy transition. They replied the following questions: How big is the momentum towards decentralization and digitalization? What are phases and business models within the energy transition? How renewable energy crowd-funding enables bottom-up participation?

• July 3 Dr.-Ing. Stefan Nießen MBA from Siemens told about Sustainable energy transition in his company. He paid special attention to the problem of CO₂ emissions: Germany‘s commitment to reduce CO₂-emissions, secondary energy demand by application, as well as to multimodal couplings between different sectors and storage technologies and components linking energy modes.

As challenge 3 within the Module 5 the students of the Virtual Academy had to evaluate one market segment (network storage, smart houses or autonomous network solutions) and propose strategies for the role of gas in this segment.

By July 15, the participants will have to prepare and present their final #project_challenge. All students who have completed three intermediate and one final assignment will receive the Virtual Academy Certificate. And the best 30-50 will be invited to the Youth Day of the St. Petersburg International Gas Forum, which will be held on October 1-3, 2019 in St. Petersburg.