Oesterreichs Energie Kongress 2026: the State Secretary at our stand and a keynote on foresight
Our review of two days at Oesterreichs Energie Kongress: State Secretary Elisabeth Zehetner at our stand, and why the keynote from the NATO Defense College has stayed with us.
On 16 and 17 September we were at Oesterreichs Energie Kongress at the Hofburg in Vienna, with a stand in the start-up row.
One panel took stock of 25 years of competition and market opening. Liberalisation brought the free choice of supplier. Much of what now looks like part of the package arrived far later: energy communities only with the EAG package in 2021.[1] Whether one of these options pays off for a particular business is still hard to check, because the figures for it are hard to get hold of.
A visit to the stand
On the first day, State Secretary Elisabeth Zehetner, Oesterreichs Energie president Michael Baminger and Secretary General Barbara Schmidt stopped by.
One line from Baminger's address went into our notes: "Customers have to be partners in this transformation, not objects of it."
The keynote that stayed with us
After two days of sessions came the talk we have discussed most since. Florence Gaub, research director at the NATO Defense College, spoke about strategic foresight. She gave three reasons why geopolitical developments are so hard to judge: the quality of the available data, its volume, and the difficulty of finding stable patterns in it.
Gaub described how foresight works: gather weak signals, build scenarios from them, then derive options for action from the scenarios. The last step matters most to her, because foresight is an instrument for deciding better today.
We know the three reasons from her talk on a much smaller scale. A year of quarter-hour values for one site is 35,040 numbers, estimates and gaps among them. The pattern in them is real, but it only emerges once someone knows where the gaps are and aggregates the values correctly.
What comes next
On 1 October the ElWG provisions on citizen energy will take effect, and existing energy communities will move into the new legal framework. Four days later the first P2P market processes are due to start.[2] We summarised what the ElWG changes for energy communities in the spring.
Thank you to everyone who stopped at our stand and told us where data access snags in their own practice. If you would like to pick up the thread, write to us through the contact form.
[1] ElWOG 2010 §§ 16a-16e as amended by BGBl. I Nr. 150/2021 (the EAG package): §§ 16b (citizen energy community) and 16e took effect on 28 July 2021 per RIS; § 16a (joint generation plant) already on 27 July 2017.
[2] ElWG, BGBl. I Nr. 91/2025, § 188 para. 3: §§ 66-72 (citizen energy) enter into force on 1 October 2026. EBUtilities, Consultation 99 (citizen energy models phase 1): the corresponding EDA market processes go live on 5 October 2026.