Is the world’s power engineering at a crossroads? Will ongoing climate changes and rise of new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart City or e-mobility give us a completely different perspective on the world’s future energy? What are our actual visions and development forecasts in this matter? Who is right concerning this matter, large energy companies and some politicians, environmentalists, climate researchers and all kinds of visionaries? Is transformation based on solar energy and hydrogen a holy grail for the energy sector? The author of this article tries to find answers to these and many other questions. Today we can already accept as a proven thesis that rapid and dangerous climate changes for our civilisation can also be attributed to high carbon and low-efficient power engineering. Power engineering and climate neutrality are no longer just problems for politicians, companies, and scientists, but have become a challenge for our civilisation. If we are to save the Earth, our civilisation has to change its mentality and develop ideas that will not prioritise economic growth and high consumption but sustainable growth in harmony with nature. For this to happen, the way people think about energy and global transformation must also change. The foregoing general remarks, but also the fact that a gradual transition from traditional large-scale fossil fuel-based energy generation to distributed energy generation based on renewable resources is inevitable, constitute the main message of this article. The article also aims to discuss the role of the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IMP PAN) in Gdańsk in the process of energy transformation in our country. The institute, as the coordinating entity of over a dozen of high-budgeted national and European projects in the field of environmentally-friendly power engineering, has contributed to some extent to the creation of conditions required for the development of prosumer power engineering (or more broadly: civic power engineering) in our country.

The paper presents the research results of the microturbines dynamics with power of a few to several hundred KW. They are combined heat and power (CHP) units (generating heat and electricity) for houses and for municipalities in the form of Autonomous Energy Regions (ARE). These are key technologies for energy sector with respect to the distributed generation and for small-scale eco-power engineering. The following examples will refer only to the several selected research projects coordinated by the IMP PAN (Institute of Fluid- Flow Machinery of the Polish Academy of Sciences) in Gdansk. The paper will focus on the dynamics of rotors and bearings lubricated by means of low boiling agents, i.e., by means of turbine working medium. Analysis of hydrodynamic instability phenomena, including the development of oil whirl and oil whip has also been carried out

Despite many years of development in the field of rotor dynamics, many issues still need to be resolved. This is due to the fact that turbomachines, even those with low output power, have a very complex design. The author of this article would like to signal these issues in the form of several questions, to which there are no precise answers. The questions are as follows: How can we build a coherent dynamic model of a turbomachine whose some subsystems have non-linear characteristics? How can we consider the so-called prehistory in our analysis, namely, the relation between future dynamic states and previous ones? Is heuristic modelling the future of rotor dynamics? What phenomena may occur when the stability limit of the system is exceeded? The attempt to find answers to these questions constitutes the subject of this article. There are obviously more similar questions, which encourage researchers from all over the world to further their research.

The article also presents the situation of the Polish power engineering against the background of global trends, as well as proposals for solving the smog problem using anti-smog technologies developed at the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gdańsk (IMP PAN) and by launching a pilot project that will cover 1,000 households equipped with these technologies. The author and his closest coworkers recommend equipping boilers, including both older and newer ones, with low-power electrostatic precipitators. In this way, one can burn lowquality fuels while keeping the emission of airborne dust at a low level. It is a quick and not pricey solution to the smog problem.