25th anniversary Consentec GmbH
We are delighted to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of our company this year. Consentec was founded in July 1999 by Prof Hans-Jürgen Haubrich, at the time and until 2009 head of the Institute for High Voltage Equipment and Grids, Digitalization and Energy Economics (IAEW) at RWTH Aachen, and his former research assistant Wolfgang Fritz.
The operational start-up team was small, but never a one-man show: right from the start, Wolfgang Fritz was joined by our longest-serving specialist Christian Linke and Gabi Fritz in administration.
Erster Eingangsbereich
25 years – in the energy landscape with its highly dynamic change processes since the turn of the millennium, that is a small eternity. Although the term ‘energy transition’ had already been invented, it hardly played a role in day-to-day business. Back then, it was more about liberalisation, competition, unbundling and – obviously more of a slogan than a serious goal – deregulation. There were isolated opinions at the time of our company’s foundation that the focus of Consentec’s activities – if there were any relevant issues to be dealt with for more than three years – would probably be on transmission expertises for a longer period of time, i.e. studies on the technical and commercial feasibility of electricity supplies by alternative suppliers. Although this was indeed a relevant topic at the time in connection with the first attempts at competitive electricity supply, it – together with the concept of transmission – was quickly superseded by the introduction of regulated grid access. It does not follow from this that market access subsequently functioned without problems, as, among other things, the practice of delivery schedules transmitted by fax first had to be overcome. A lot has happened since then, even if there has always been and will continue to be a need for improvements to the market processes and their implementation.
Neues Gebäude, neuer Eingangsbereich
Issues closely related to free access to the grid for electricity and gas suppliers make up only a small part of the topics we have dealt with over the past 25 years. In most cases, thematic expansions have gone hand in hand with energy policy and regulatory debates and decisions, both at European and national level in Germany and other European countries in which we are active. However, the development of new subject areas was also very much linked to developments at the management level of our company, specifically with the addition of a further managing partner when Christian Zimmer joined the company in 2002 and Christoph Maurer taking over this position in 2007. Christoph Maurer and Wolfgang Fritz are now equal owners of our company, following the death of Prof Haubrich in 2019.
Heutiger Eingangsbereich
Another important prerequisite for the expansion of the variety of topics, which in the view of our team is what makes our work so appealing, was the intensive collaboration with a wide range of cooperation partners from the very beginning. In the beginning, the IAEW was naturally our closest partner, later joined by other university institutes, Fraunhofer and other research organisations, other consultancy firms and, occasionally, industrial companies. We are pleased that the intensive exchange with these partners has enabled us to consolidate and continuously expand our claim of being able to offer science-based specialist consulting with a high level of modelling expertise.
Erste Website
In this way, the range of tasks we work on has continued to expand over the years,
▪ Starting with technical and economic assessments of concepts for grid design, expansion planning and operation management as well as regulatory topics such as incentive regulation and grid fee calculation,
▪ to more system-related and economic issues relating to the planning and operational – including cross-border – coordination of generation systems and transmission grids, the procurement of ancillary services and the promotion of renewables
▪ through to fundamental energy policy issues such as electricity market design, including the ongoing debate on the capacity market, modelling long-term scenarios for the energy system, monitoring security of supply and risk prevention.
Unsere zweite Website
We were only able to develop this wide range of topics because we were able to rely on a highly qualified and committed team that has grown gradually but continuously. The increasing need for personnel was already evident in the first few months, when we had to deal with the fact that the success of individual services could make the difference between being idle or overworked. We have never seen growth as an end in itself, but only to an extent that was compatible with our requirements for the integration of new team members and matched the expansion of our activities, both in terms of team size and the diversification of required qualifications and experience backgrounds. Today, we are pleased to have built up a powerful team of 25 colleagues from different disciplines (engineering and industrial engineering, economics, physics) – plus student employees – who work closely together without hierarchical structures and with whom we can fulfil a wide range of tasks.
Zweite Website
As the team has grown, so have our offices, although we have remained loyal to the north of Aachen with our offices on Grüner Weg, which we moved into at the end of 2006. We still have visual contact with the former industrial complex in which we were initially housed (and which occasionally confronted us with supply-related challenges in terms of heating, electricity and telecommunications). Speaking of visual contact: With views of wind turbines, photovoltaic systems, extra-high voltage power lines and switchgear, former spherical gas storage tanks, a combined heat and power plant, the cooling tower cloud of a lignite-fired power plant and the premises of a well-known Aachen-based energy supplier, we chose an energy-rich environment. The fact that we have not yet outgrown these premises is thanks to a momentous after-effect of the otherwise very unpleasant coronavirus pandemic, namely the post-coronavirus work organisation developed jointly by the workforce with flexible arrangements for working from home and office workstations. The new work culture also allows team members to choose places of residence far away from the office location, which is utilised intensively. For business trips, which are fortunately possible again after the end of the pandemic, starting points other than Aachen are often an advantage anyway, at least within Germany.
Heutige Website
However, the new world of work is also making it increasingly obvious what is actually a truism: team cohesion is not only created through joint project work, but also through opportunities to meet and socialise in the office, e.g. at the coffee machine and over lunch together, as well as outside of working hours. We can look back on a wide range of company outings, celebrations and sporting activities in which we have always taken on small to large challenges outside of our day-to-day consultancy work, be it on hikes, company runs, ice skating, high ropes courses, via ferrata, bouldering, raft building, football golf, frisbee golf, GPS scavenger hunts (outdoor escape) or even exploring the special flair and nightlife of Amsterdam. Training courses on work and driving safety can also be surprisingly entertaining, for example when it becomes clear that fire extinguishers are better suited to extinguishing burning office wallpaper than filled coffee pots and that some private cars can only withstand driving safety training to a limited extent.
We look back with pleasure and pride on the past 25 years of our company’s existence and would like to thank our customers, our co-operation partners and especially our current and former employees, who have made this possible and will hopefully remain closely associated with us for a long time to come.
The long-standing relationships with many customers and partners and the extremely low fluctuation in our team make us confident that we are on the right track.