Siemens launches start-up collaboration activity with investments of €800m

Siemens monitors more than 9,000 wind and fossil fuelled turbines online, says Kaeser

To celebrate its 200th birthday, Siemens founder Werner Von Siemens said the company is launching a new era of "ingenuity for life" and will be emphasising its focus on clarification, automation, and digitalisation.
It will launch the new "Siemens' start-up collaboration activity". Siemens had invested more than €800m in more than 180 start-ups, and Siemens Venture Capital (SVC) invested in innovative start-ups for 20 years.
Siemens pursues a three-pronged strategy; cooperation with, foundation of, and investment in start-ups. Such investments are primarily made in the field of industrial software and cyber security, energy management, mobility management, and point of care diagnostics.
At the "Innovation at Siemens" press and analyst event in Munich on 8 December, President and CEO of Siemens AG, Joe Kaeser, said it monitors more than 9,000 turbines, wind and fossil fuelled, online.
He said smart data analysis allows signing new services agreements with power plant operators, ensuring that customers have the same reliability but greater availability.
In 2015, Siemens employed about 32,100 people in research and development with investments of €300m out of a total €4.8bn. The company's employees reported approximate 7,650 inventions.
Siemens comes along way to digitalise its services when they achieved €16bn in revenues from classic and digital services and expect that digital services will achieve an annual market growth of 15%.
They revealed groundbreaking technology for electricity transmission that represents a landmark in the transition to alternative energy resources in Germany. Full bridge technology ensures that power can be transmitted over long distances with a high level of reliability and low costs.
Boasting a transmission capacity of 2,000 MW, the latest generation of converters stations will be employed at both ends of these routes, converting from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC). The use of full bridge technology enables fast and flexible fault recovery on low-loss DC without needing to power down the system and stabilising the AC grid.
CEO of the energy management division at Siemens, Jan Morsik, said full bridge technology identifies faults extremely quickly and prevents grid problems from cascading into blackouts.
Morisk said the German transmission system operating Amprion and TransnetBW will be using this technology for the first time in Siemens ULTRANET direct current project.
"ULTRANET is a joint project between Amprion and TransnetBW and extends over 340km," Morisk said.
According to the revolution in future energy systems, Siemens said that by 2100, the seven giant countries are planning to decarbonise the entire global economy. As early 2050, Germany alone expects to cover 80% of its energy needs from renewable energy.
Siemens researchers are therefore sure that renewable energy will replace fossil fuels much earlier than the estimated time, and so the company launched the "Energiewende2.0" strategy.
The chemical industry has so far largely been dependent on petroleum to make its basic materials. Petroleum is the raw material of ethylene, which is used in industry process; nearly 1m tonne of ethylene sells in the market for up to €1,200, and the dangers of Co2 emission, according to Siemens.
In the transportation sector, Siemens posted over €3bn in new orders in fully automated metro systems in the past five years, and expects the automation trend will expand to regional, long distance, and freight rail.