The Biological Transformation of Energy Supply and Storage – Technologies and Scenarios for Biointelligent Value Creation

Abstract

In addition to digitization, industrial value creation is facing another massive upheaval, characterized by the integration of biological principles, processes and organisms. This development is driven by the rapid development and emerging leaps in biotechnology, synthetic biology and information technology. The increasing possibilities in those fields have led to the vision of a biological transformation, an approach that was systematically analyzed within the preliminary study BIOTRAIN for the first time. The study reveals energy supply and storage as one of the main fields of action, since it is a fundamental prerequisite for competitive and sustainable value creation. In this field, the biological transformation includes solutions towards a sustainable energy value creation system. Brought together, the biological level (synthetic biology, microbiology and enzyme technology), the technical level (plant engineering, process engineering and automation technology) and the information level (evolutionary algorithms and intelligent control concepts) provide essential basics for this development. In this paper, promising research approaches in all subareas of the biological transformation are summarized regarding energy supply and storage, with the aim to detail the path towards the target state of a biointelligent energy value creation system.