Zagreb, the conference’s usual home, made way for Gran Canaria this year. It’s only the third time the international Sdewes conference, dedicated to the sustainable development of energy, water and environmental systems, has left the Croatian capital, and the first time it has come to Spain at all. From August 31 to September 3, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) hosted the 21st edition, drawing more than 550 researchers from around the world, with around 500 attending in person.
The event was organised by ULPGC’s Renewable Energy Systems Research Group (Grres), together with the University of Zagreb and the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. The local organising committee was led by Pedro Jesús Cabrera Santana, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering with a long track record in island energy systems planning, a detail that matters: alongside sessions on smart grid planning, desalination, sustainable mobility and the circular economy, the programme included, for the first time, a dedicated session on the resilience of energy systems on islands.
Among the most prominent speakers were Sylvie Lorente, editor-in-chief of the journal Energy Conversion and Management and a professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, Francisca Segura Manzano of the University of Huelva, and Henning Meschede, chair of energy systems technology at the University of Paderborn in Germany.
For ULPGC’s rector, Lluís Serra, who chaired the opening ceremony, hosting Sdewes places the Canary Islands at the centre of international clean energy research at a moment when the archipelago is trying to speed up its own transition. Grres, a team of ten researchers plus PhD candidates and trainees, has spent years developing technological solutions specifically for island territories like the Canaries, where isolated power grids and a long-standing dependence on fossil fuels make the transition harder than elsewhere.
This isn’t an abstract debate for people living on the islands. The Canaries still rely heavily on thermal power plants, and the challenge of integrating solar and wind power into small, isolated grids, alongside ensuring water supply through low-impact desalination, is already the focus of several EU-backed projects active in the archipelago. That a congress of this scale chose Gran Canaria for its first Spanish stop suggests the work done so far by the island’s university in this field is starting to be recognised beyond the region’s borders.
It remains to be seen how much of what was discussed in ULPGC’s lecture halls between late August and early September will translate into projects on the ground. But for three days, at least, the island was at the centre of the global conversation about how to power the future without exhausting the resources of the present.
