This report explores business models for storage solutions that may help the European energy system adapt to new challenges.

This Hot Energy Topic aims at defining and assessing megatrends impacting the future energy system of the European Union (EU) to the year 2050.

The purpose of this paper is to go through the transformations that new modes of energy storage – mostly batteries – are expected to bring to the energy systems. 

Will a divided Middle East become the center of a new “Great Game”? The world’s global powers are aligned in it: the United States, falsely tempted by retraction; Russia, establishing its position in an unexpected state of play, France, destabilized by the contradictions of its own policy… In addition are tussles for regional hegemony between Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

Russian military intervention in Syria was not an attempt to exert dominance as a hegemonic power in the Middle East.

Among Russia’s strategic priorities, Asia traditionally played a secondary role compared to the West. In the mid-1990s, then Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov initiated a rapprochement with China and India. Then, in 2014, deteriorating relations between Russia and the West prompted Moscow to begin its “great pivot to the East”.

Pictures are an integral part of the process of conveying the state and character of French-German relations. Such pictures highlight not only justified criticisms but also prejudices and clichés. The use of these pictures has intensified since 2008 because the financial and EU crises heightened resentment between the two countries.

Given the tensions between the EU and its main gas supplier, Russia, the European Commission has been revisiting since 2014 its energy security strategy.