The smarter E Europe 2026
Munich.

What The smarter E Europe is, in two lines

The smarter E Europe is the largest European trade-fair platform for the energy industry: under one roof, at Messe München, it brings together four parallel shows — Intersolar Europe (solar PV), ees Europe (storage), Power2Drive Europe (e-mobility and charging) and EM-Power Europe (energy management and digitalisation). It runs annually and in its 2025 edition recorded around 2,737 exhibitors from 57 countries and ~107,000 trade visitors from 157 countries, with over 2,600 participants in the conference and side-event programme.

This is not a technology showcase: it is the point where installers, EPCs, utilities, project developers and energy managers choose the suppliers and technologies for the plants and orders of the coming months. The real purchasing decisions close in the weeks after the event, when the prospect compares the modules, inverters, storage systems and wallboxes seen at the fair. That is why, at an event of this scale, lead management matters as much as the stand presence.

What to exhibit, where to exhibit

The definitive 2026 hall layout may be updated by the organiser, but the structure of the Messe München fairground is well established: halls A1-A6, B0-B6 and C1-C6 plus a large Outdoor Area, across roughly 200,000 m² as planned. The product focus follows the four parallel shows:

• Intersolar Europe → solar PV: modules, inverters, mounting systems, trackers, components and monitoring software
• ees Europe → energy storage: batteries, BESS systems, thermal management, residential, commercial and utility-scale solutions
• Power2Drive Europe → e-mobility and charging: wallboxes, charging stations, charging infrastructure, V2G solutions and charge management
• EM-Power Europe → energy management: smart grids, digitalisation, load management, solutions for industry and buildings

The conferences are held separately at the ICM - Internationales Congress Center München.

Practical positioning tip: work out which of the four worlds your product really belongs to and which buyer you are after. If you sell bulky hardware, mounting systems or solutions you can demonstrate live (vehicles, BESS containers, charging stations), consider the Outdoor Area, where a demonstration is worth more than a catalogue; if you sell components, power electronics, software or services, you work better from an indoor stand, where the technical visitor stops to compare specs. In both cases, hold the border between the shows: many buyers move across solar, storage and e-mobility in the same visit.

Visitor profile

The audience at The smarter E Europe is highly professional and strongly international (visitors from 157 countries in 2025). It is not a generic crowd: people arrive with a project to close, a tender to award or a supply contract to renegotiate. In practice you can expect:

• Installers, EPCs and designers of solar PV and storage plants (~25-30%), the largest segment, looking for products, prices and availability
• Utilities, grid operators and energy companies (~15-20%), technical and purchasing leads with high volumes and long decision cycles
• Project developers and investors in renewables (~10-15%), evaluating technologies for a pipeline of utility-scale plants
• E-mobility operators and charging-infrastructure managers (~10-15%), driven by the growth of Power2Drive
• Industry, facility and energy managers (~10-15%), looking for self-consumption, storage and load management to cut their energy bill
• Distributors, wholesalers and resellers of components (~10%), selecting the brands to add to their catalogue

The decision-making profile is high: many visitors are senior, with spending power or a prescriptive role. The international share is substantial (157 countries), so equip yourself to handle conversations and leads in English and in several currencies, and to tell the local installer apart at a glance from the large international group or the utility.

How to prepare in the 4 weeks before the event

Week -4 → Messaging audit

Check that your value proposition answers the three questions every operator asks in the first 30 seconds at the stand:

1. What you do, in one sentence (e.g. “three-phase hybrid inverters, 5-12 kW, for residential and small commercial”)
2. Who for, a precise segment (e.g. “installers and EPCs in Southern Europe”)
3. What changes, a measurable benefit (yield, % self-consumption, cost per kWh installed, payback time, regulatory compliance)

No endless slides. One clear sentence, repeated by everyone on the team, in English too, because most buyers here speak neither Italian nor German. Across four parallel shows, also make clear which of the four worlds you are talking to: solar PV, storage, e-mobility or energy management.

Week -3 → Stand operation playbook

Define who does what across the three days:

• Who staffs the stand and collects the leads
• Who runs the demos or live demonstrations (essential if you are in the Outdoor Area or have a product to show in operation)
• Who is in the back office (HQ) doing live follow-up during the event itself (at a fair with ~107,000 visitors, that is a huge advantage)
• Who is the point of contact for foreign buyers and international delegations

The smarter E runs for three intense days: without shift rotation the quality of conversations collapses by the afternoon. With a team of more than 3 people, organise time slots and book appointments in advance with key prospects.

Week -2 → Qualification form

Every contact collected at the fair must be qualified on the spot, not “later”. There are only 3 critical questions:

1. Timing, when is the project / supply due? (Q3/Q4/2027/don’t know)
2. Budget, is there already a spending line or allocated financing?
3. Decision, who decides and how many people are involved (utilities, industrial groups and investors often have lengthy committees)?

Everything else (annual volumes, plant types, geographic area, brands already handled) is found in the public data sources that good automatic enrichment covers without you having to ask at the fair.

Week -1 → CRM integrations

The classic mistake: contacts collected on paper or saved in the fair app, photos of business cards, and then nobody puts them into the CRM. The follow-up starts too late, when the prospect has already talked to your competitors, perhaps in the hall next door.

Set up the system so that every badge or ticket scan, at the fair, lands straight in the company CRM, with an event tag + qualification answers + a voice note from the salesperson. Not in an Excel file, not in a Google sheet “we’ll sort out on Monday”.

Is the official The smarter E Europe app worth it?

Yes, there is an official app: the The smarter E / Intersolar Europe Event App. It does well what it is designed for, namely planning and orienting the visitor:

• Exhibitor list and fairground map
• Personal visit agenda
• Conference and side-event programme
• Saving favourites and useful contacts

It is an excellent tool for visitors. But it is important to be honest about what the app does NOT do, which is why it does not replace a lead-capture system for exhibitors:

• It does not integrate with your company CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive). Contacts stay in the app.
• It does not enrich data automatically. If all you have from the badge is a name + company, that is all you keep.
• It does not send follow-ups to the prospect. You have to do that yourself, manually, afterwards.
• It does not generate an executive report on stand performance. At most it gives you a basic export.
• It changes (or is renewed) at every edition: you end up with different apps on your phone, one per event, with no workflow continuity.

At a fair with these numbers, spread across four shows and an outdoor area where many contacts arrive via business card, you need a tool that digitises the contact and routes it into the commercial workflow: fair → CRM → follow-up. That is exactly the pattern Linkly runs with its 6 AI agents (capture, enrichment, qualification, routing, follow-up, report), see how Linkly works.

What to do during the 3 days of the fair

Day 1 (Tuesday) → opening and calibration

• Team briefing in the morning, review the 3 messages and the roles (stand / demo / back office)
• Calibration: the first 10-15 leads of the day are there to fine-tune the qualification questions
• A more orderly opening, use it for the more technical conversations and to book appointments for the following days
• At the end of the day, a first debrief: what works, what to fix tomorrow

Day 2 (Wednesday) → the decision-making core

Typically the busiest day for traffic. This is where the international delegations, the large groups and the senior buyers from utilities, EPCs and investors concentrate. Keep a senior person present at all times and schedule the demos: the event’s most strategic prospects come through in this window. Every contact, already in the CRM with timing/budget/decision.

Day 3 (Thursday) → closing, lower traffic but high quality

Traffic drops, but it is the right moment to:

• Close appointments with the hot leads from the previous two days
• Have more in-depth conversations (quieter stands, demos without a queue)
• Tour the competitors and the other three shows: see who turned up and pick up ideas for the next edition

What to do in the 7 days after the fair

Response speed (speed-to-lead) is the factor that separates those who monetise the fair from those who file it away. Companies that contact leads within 24-48 hours convert far more than those who start one or two weeks later. At The smarter E, where the buying cycle can be long and the amounts high, recovering even just a few days is worth a lot — especially because the prospect has seen dozens of alternatives in the same visit.

The winning follow-up playbook:

1. Within 24h, a personalised email to every qualified lead with timing/budget/decision. No templates, with a reference to something specific said at the stand (the inverter they looked at, the plant they mentioned, the project under way).
2. Within 7 days, assign a dedicated salesperson to each qualified lead. One specific touchpoint scheduled (call, on-site demo, site visit), not a mass email.
3. Within 14 days, deliver the promises made at the stand (technical sheet, quote, product availability, datasheet). Extractable automatically from the salesperson’s voice notes if the system recorded them.
4. Within 30 days, an executive report on performance vs target, breakdown by salesperson, show (PV / storage / e-mobility / EM) and country, estimated pipeline. To use when asking management to renew the event budget.

Practical FAQ

How much does it cost to exhibit at The smarter E Europe?

Costs are not published in a standard form and vary a great deal depending on the show chosen (Intersolar, ees, Power2Drive, EM-Power), indoor vs outdoor area, floor space, location and stand build. As a purely indicative order of magnitude for a three-day presence at a German fair of this scale: exhibition space at Messe München starts from several tens of euros per m² for the base rate, on top of which come stand build, technical services, staff, travel and logistics. For a mid-sized stand you easily reach five-figure sums. The real numbers should be requested directly from the organiser: they depend too much on the type of stand and the show.

Which is the best day for the most important contacts?

The second day (Wednesday) is typically the busiest for traffic and concentrates the senior buyers, international delegations and large groups. The first day is useful for the more orderly technical conversations and for booking appointments; the third, with less traffic, is ideal for closing hot leads and talking at length. Plan the presence of your senior profiles accordingly.

When does visitor registration open?

Usually in the months before the event, with tickets available to buy online on the official site. Early registration is the fastest way to get your badge and avoid the queues; check dates and procedures directly there, as they can vary from edition to edition.

Which of the four shows should I target?

It depends on what you sell and who you are after. Modules, inverters and PV components → Intersolar Europe; batteries and storage systems → ees Europe; wallboxes, charging stations and charging infrastructure → Power2Drive Europe; smart grids, software and load management → EM-Power Europe. That said, the four worlds are physically close and many buyers move across them in the same visit: choose the show based on your core, but be ready to talk to those coming from the other three as well.

What alternative to paper for collecting contacts?

The pile of business cards collected across the halls and the outdoor area is the worst option: time spent digitising, transcription errors, lost leads. Three practical alternatives:

1. Official fair app (The smarter E / Intersolar Europe Event App), excellent for planning the visit, but disconnected from your CRM (see the section above).
2. CRM with native mobile scanning (HubSpot and Salesforce have dedicated features), works if the team knows how to use it. Often it does not, with hands full, in a crowded stand.
3. A dedicated lead-capture system + AI agents for enrichment, qualification and follow-up, the pattern Linkly runs. See how Linkly works.

Page updated ahead of the 2026 edition. The quantitative figures cited refer to the 2025 edition; the 2026 targets should be verified on the official site. For official information and exhibitor/visitor registration, refer to the thesmartere.de website.