I’m delighted to announce that the first edition hardcover hard copies of my kids book Amy’s Balancing Act are now in stock!
You can get signed copies from my online shop and regular copies from all good bookshops (if they don’t yet have them on bookshelves they can order them through the distributor Woodslane).
To read more about the book please see this page.
I’ve chosen to finish up at The Australian National University this week. Some, incomplete, reflections on the six years there:
“it is vital that before we build more network, we use more network” – AER Chair, Clare Savage
Electrification and population growth will both drive significant increases in electricity demand over the coming decades. This study investigates how the effect of this growth on zone substations could be mitigated by scheduling water heating and electric vehicle charging to occur during solar hours and overnight.
Taking the ACT as a case study, we find that the complete electrification of water heating and private vehicles, together with population growth would drive a large increase in total demand. By 2045 – when the ACT Government plans to get off gas – the increase is on the order of 75% for high growth regions such as Gungahlin. 30% is due to population growth and 45% from vehicle electrification. The electrification of water heating is compensated for by the efficiency of heat pump hot water systems, which we assume make up 75% of heaters in 2045.
We find that the super simple approach of scheduling water heating and vehicle charging loads to occur at fixed hours each day throughout a year effectively avoids these appliances contributing to peak demand on zone substations. Modelled zone substation demand continues to peak on winter evenings due to other loads (significantly space heating in the cold Canberra climate), which we model to be inflexible.
It concludes that simple strategic policies that shift loads into low demand periods would enable significant growth in total demand to be accommodated within existing zone substation capacity limits. For example, in the suburb of Gungahlin, such measures could limit peak demand increases to just 25%, while all private vehicles and domestic hot water are electrified, and the population grows by 30%.
For the avoidance of doubt, the study does not purport to predict how demand growth and demand scheduling will develop, but to provide quantified, plausible scenarios of how they could develop to motivate and guide policy and public initiatives.
Noting that zone substations are only one link in the electricity grid, three goals stand out:
Full report below
Continue readingA paper published in npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport analysing the vehicle-to-grid response to a major grid disturbance in the Australian grid.
Vehicle-to-grid technology enables electric vehicles to contribute their large, high-power batteries to power systems reserves. Here we report the first demonstration of a fleet of vehicles discharging to support system security after a frequency contingency in a national grid. Our results highlight the potential of vehicle-to-grid, with vehicles discharging within 6 s of the contingency event, and shortcomings, with vehicles recommencing charging before the power system had fully recovered.
Full paper below
Continue reading
Intuitively it makes sense that microgrids are a good idea. There are many of us that want that to be the case and for good reason. They have the potential to bolster local resilience, increase utilisation of renewable energy sources and give a sense of autonomy back to communities.
One of BSGIP’s most substantial pieces of research is drawing to a close. The Southcoast microgrid Reliability Feasibility (SµRF) project is a $3.1 m transdisciplinary project that explores the challenges and benefits of microgrids within an Australian context. Set within the New South Wales south coast shire of Eurobodalla, a region devastated by the 2019-2020 Black Summer, the project took a deep dive into this technology and how it could be integrated into today’s complex and multifaceted energy system.
This article focuses on two recently published reports; a technical report that lays out a number of scenarios using real-world data applied to selected sites, and a social science report examining governance, social and regulatory issues under the current system.
Continue readingIMHO, the energy system has 2 goals:
• Efficiency – minimizing total economic & ecological costs
• Equity – human wellbeing, individually and collectively
The (Nobel prize earning) Tinbergen rule stipulates that each of these goals requires its own policy instrument. Relying on 1 market price – to efficiently manage EV charging without inequitable punishing parents for cooking at 6pm – flies in the face of this.
So, what can be done? Late last year I had the privilege to speak my mind about this problem and potential solutions (spoiler: separating energy demand into an essential and a flexible component – which could just be EVs to start with) as part of a Victorian Council of Social Service event and in a presentation to the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) economic research team.
The first preso was recorded
Slides and here
And context of the VCOSS project is https://vcoss.org.au/projects/2024/01/energy-health-nexus/
I had the pleasure of discussing all things energy transition with the ACT Chief Minister late last year in my role as ACT Emerging Scientist of the Year.
His description below… https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrewbarrmla_dr-bjorn-sturmberg-has-been-awarded-the-2024-activity-7274676995525894145-duD4
“Dr Bjorn Sturmberg has been awarded the 2024 ACT Emerging Scientist of the Year Award for his work on clean energy technology.
The Award recognises the achievements of an emerging scientist and celebrates excellence in scientific research and innovation here in the ACT.
Continue reading
RouteZero, our tool for simulating the energy consumption of electricbuses on any given bus route and the grid impacts of charging them at a bus depot has been published in a Nature Portfolio special issue https://www.nature.com/articles/s44333-024-00008-2.epdf
The tool is now also availble opensource in its entirity https://github.com/bsgip/RouteZero/
While the easy to use web version remains freely available https://routezero.cecs.anu.edu.au/ has been extended to include Autearoa.
If you’d like to have further routes added to the web version please send me a message. All we need is the gtfs files (which are ubiquotously available).
Hats off once more to Johannes Hendriks for doing the heavy lifting in creating this fantastic tool!
This study builds upon the recently published Unplugged is inflexible report to explore one avenue by which EV drivers could be incentivised to:
While there are many avenues by which this could be done, we here explore the potential for EV drivers to be offered very simple, flat retail offers based solely on how often they plug in their EVs and how much energy their EV consumes. This approach entirely removes considerations of when in the day vehicles are plugged in, which lightens the mental burden on drivers and may contribute to greater acceptance of managed charging.
This concept is motivated by the belief that creating price-certainty, and ideally cost-certainty, is a core way in which electricity retailers create value for their customers. This EV charging arrangement engages customers (EV drivers) is a quid pro quo where retailers contribute their expertise and diversity of customers to manage pricing risk, and EV drivers contribute the flexibility of their charging demand.
Our modelling shows that doubling the amount of time EVs are plugged in for reduces the cost of charging by half. To be clear, this requires nothing of EV drivers other than having their EV connected to a charger for longer periods, which enables more flexibly charging behaviour.
To quantify the risk for retailers we conduct a statistical analysis in terms of the cost of EV charging per day or per kWh. This suggests that offering a fixed price per day may go beyond retailers’ risk appetite, making a fixed price per kWh the more attractive option. This is likely also fairer for customers as it charges for the precise amount of energy used.
The addition of vehicle-to-grid increases the benefits of longer plug-in times by facilitating market arbitrage. Vehicles that are driven less than 40km per day and are plugged in to chargers for more than 8 hours a day (with vehicle-to-grid) can, on average, be charged at zero or negative cost.
While outside of the scope of this study, we note that this same tariff concept (and simulation model) could be applied matching flexible EV charging with the generation of a collection of wind or solar farms. This would provide another way for a retailer to manage/fix their price exposure while simultaneously creating value for customers by charging vehicles with zero emissions power.
Full report below
Continue readingI’m very honoured to be named as the ACT Emerging Scientist of the Year today. I thought I’d share the 60 second video I made for the application.
In a neat little project for the ACT Government I analyse the (IMO oft overlooked) critical step of when EV drivers plug in their vehicles. If they’re not plugged in for substantially longer than required for charging then EVs are not the fabulously flexible load that they could be.