We are pleased to invite you to join the first meeting of the new Global Smart Grid Federation initiative: Forming and leading a dynamic and interactive Power Utilities Business Innovation Forum.

It is by now global common understanding that the Power Utility market place is changing rapidly and presenting promising times for Power Utilities, as long as the utilities are able to capture the opportunities presented by this disruptive change. Identifying the new opportunities, restructuring corporate strategies and business models, and getting management and employees cooperation for such drastic changes are the key challenges facing most power utilities around the world.

The Global Smart Grid Federation decided to step up to the challenge, and set a forum for the assigned leaders of those changes to exchange ideas, learn from past experience of other industries, establish cooperation, and ensure their organizations are staying at the edge of the market.

The forum will be an on-going initiative and use online and in-person sessions to enable its members to:

• Identify possible new services and business models
• Discuss the challenges
• Explore possible business partnerships
• Expose new potential markets (geographies and services) for the utilities
• Evaluate new business models (already mentioned in 1st point?)
• A meeting point between vendors, service firms, and utilities

To kick-start the forum, we will be holding its first workshop, leveraging the 4th Israeli Smart Energy Conference, taking place on March 9th & 10th in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The workshop will bring together leading utilities (such as ERDF, RWE, IEC, etc.), vendors, new market players, as well as some of the innovation leaders from Israel who got famous as the “Start-up Nation”, all to ensure productive discussions with innovative points of views. Participation at the forum, and the workshop, is by invitation only, and there will be no cost to join the workshop.

> Please let us know if you are interested to join the forum in general, and if you are able to attend the workshop on March 9th.