Motivation & Pricing

Why is Energynautics organizing the Renewable Energy Grid Integration Week?

As a power systems consultant with a focus on matters relating to innovative grid design, modelling and power system integration of renewable energies, we have a substantial interest in the advancements of large-scale grid integration of renewable energies and hybrid power systems.

It is our goal to stimulate interdisciplinary thinking between industry and research by providing a platform for discussion and for sharing ideas and knowledge regarding the key issues in the field of large-scale grid integration of renewable energies.

Pricing Structure

We strive to keep the Workshop prices at an affordable level for all participants. See the price development in a five-year-span and in comparison to a nine-year-span in case of the Wind Integration Workshop here.
It should be noted that the 2022 Wind & Solar Workshop will be a hybrid three-day event instead of the previous purely on-site 2.5-day events, yet prices have remained essentially stable.

2013
London

2017
Berlin

2022
The Hague

5-Year Growth
2017-2022

9-Year Growth
2013-2022

Early Bird

880.00

896.69

1,90%

Mid Registration

980,00

995,00

991,74

-0,33%

1,20%

Late Registration

1.120,00

1.150,00

1.123,97

-2,26%

0,35%

On-Site Registration

1.230,00

1.250,00

1.227,27

-1,82%

-0,22%

Speakers

740,00

750,00

797,52

6,34%

7,77%

Poster Presenters

880,00

896,69

1,90%

Profits of the Workshop

As a consulting company, the Energynautics Conferences complement our diverse portfolio, yet are not the foundation of our business. It is our intention to plan the Conferences in a way to make them affordable for our participants and cost-covering for Energynautics. We need the Conferences to pay for themselves, but we do not plan for a large profit margin. In the past, we have had an equal amount of Events that has left us with a deficit as ones that have created a profit.

What do you do with the profits?

In case of a profitable Conference year, we

a) generate reserves for a deficient Conference year

b) subsidize the prices for the next year as we are striving every year to keep the Conference prices at an affordable level

Entrepreneurial Risk and Workload

Organizing conferences with up to 500 participants comes with a considerable entrepreneurial risk. There are thousands of working hours involved in planning a Conference, e.g. the Grid Integration Week featuring the Wind & Solar Integration Workshop, the Hydrogen Power System Integration Workshop and the E-Mobility Power Systems Integration Symposium generates a workload of 3.000+ hours a year for the Workshop Team.

Furthermore, many of the necessary bookings for the Conferences require either a down payment or complete advance payments. These costs need to be financed in advance by the company, which poses another entrepreneurial risk.

Last but not least, Energynautics has to register with the host country’s tax authorities for each Event. That means applying for a tax ID, researching and following the country’s tax requirement and submitting tax declarations. As tax standards differ from country to country even within the European Union, this not only means more workload but also the risk of getting it wrong once in a while.

How do you calculate your prices?

Conference Prices take into account several factors:

Event Location

1. City/ Country – for one: some cities are more expensive than others – that means higher prices for catering, technical supplier, transports, team accommodation, etc. Furthermore, expenses for taxing vary from country to country, even within the European Union.

2. Hotel/Conference Center/University Prices – only a small number of locations offer the kind of rooms we need for a Conference with three parallel sessions and combined Opening and Closing Sessions – they are not always the lowest price options.

Service

We strive to offer you a flawless service, starting with your abstract submission to providing an inspiring Conference program including accompanying events like poster receptions, Workshop dinners and study trips to give you plenty of opportunities for networking with your peers. We offer you informative conference websites, a modern online registration, prompt customer care and a comprehensive on-site service. This results in additional booking costs and additional expenses for manpower. In our opinion, the result – a flawless Event experience – is worth the expenses – as many of our participants confirm in our After-Workshop-Polls year after year.

Hybrid Event Format

Organizing an event both on-site AND virtually, practically means organizing two events in parallel. All technical features, hosting manpower as well as rendering and hosting the recorded footage add up to the on-site costs.

Why do speakers have to pay a participation fee at all?

We strive to keep the Workshop prices at an affordable level for all participants. As a consequence, speakers also have to share the financial burden. If we granted free of charge participation to all speakers, we would have to double the prices for all other participants. This would make the Workshop less attractive to regular participants and very hard to finance as well.

We actually came up with the current pricing scheme in accordance with our long time participants’ wishes: they prefer to have speakers share in the financing with the current reduced speakers’ fee.

But there are other Conferences in the field of RE grid integration that offer better prices – how do you explain that?

Size: Calculations for a 3.000 people conference and exhibition differs immensely from what we can calculate in our Workshops’ dimension.

Content: Energynautics Workshops offer each speaker a 15-20 minute slot to present their projects and allot 20 minutes time for discussion at the end of each session. The “big” conferences usually reduce the speaker time to 10 minutes per speaker and do not plan for speaker and audience interaction.

Variety: We offer two to three parallel sessions in order to give our participants a wide variety of topics to choose from. Like that, everyone can pick their favorite sessions or presentations and thus create their optimum individual conference experience.