May 17, 2024: It’s a city where the past and future exist side by side, and this week Strasbourg welcomed, for the third time, the 2024 AABC Europe conference — bringing together a global audience of battery technologists and their key suppliers to showcase development trends, technologies and predictions of the market to come.
Strasbourg pulls off the feat of being successfully straddled between a medieval past and a progressive future — a fitting metaphor as 1,300 delegates descended on the city’s convention centre to show their commitment to invest in vehicle electrification and eMobility.
The conference — in its 14th year — has always excelled in propelling forward this momentum, presenting unparalleled coverage of the research and development that helps drive outcomes and supports the next generation of electric vehicle batteries.
Whether targeting the entire conference community of battery technologists, a topic-specific community, a specific individual, or high-level decision makers, the conference organisers presented a variety of methods to access delegates.
This year’s convention — held over three days — offered 12 programmes including battery recycling, chemistry, grid-scale energy storage and high performance lithium battery.
The output from the first day sessions has been terrific,” one delegate told Batteries International. “I attended a fantastic talk by Dragoljub Vrankovic from Daimler Truck presenting on electric trucks and how they could be the future backbone of the transport industry. Speculative? True, but also highlighting a great market opportunity.
Another well attended session was by Tim Hotz from the Roland Berger Consultancy — see elsewhere in this bulletin — talking about the energy storage market expansion and how sodium ion batteries.
An annual highlight of AABC is their encouragement of attendees to gain further exposure by presenting their work in poster sessions. It’s an effective way for delegates to discuss their research and to collaborate with interested attendees and speakers.
This year saw a record 80 posters displayed with a common theme being the safety of LFP and understanding why thermal runaway happens — a complex but crucial issue that dominated other parts of the conference.
As ever the exhibition has proved to be a real draw for delegates with the great and the good of suppliers, consultants and product developers serving Europe’s automotive battery industry highlighting services and skills.
Maccor, the international battery and cell testing company — incidentally an area of business that was well represented on the exhibition floor — is the longest-standing exhibitor at AABC and as such gets first dibs on the placement of their exhibition stand — right across the entrance to the vast exhibitor hall.
Mike Sandoval, VP of business development said the footfall had continued to be great. He said business made at the conference was going to be slow burn. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” he said. “We have a six month sales cycle from lead to purchase order and we will do some business here but also for me it’s an opportunity to catch up with old, long-time friends and to make a lot of new ones too.”
And any critical feedback on the conference?
We at Batteries International only heard one and that was to do with the content. “There’s too much of it,” one delegate told us. “I was stuck on several occasions between choosing to attend conflicting sessions. The organizers have given the option of us seeing the slide decks and live streams but being in the hall and talking with the others after the talks is part of the package.”
Too much content? From a conference perspective, we couldn’t help thinking there were worse problems to be had..
