My kickstarter campaign to contribute towards the costs of illustrating and publishing Amy’s Balancing Act is now live. Check out the video and campaign page and, support by pre-ordering a copy and sharing the campaign.
Amy’s kickstarter is live!
Author Archives → bjorns
Explainer – The animals of the energy transition
Amy’s Balancing Act, is a fable about the power of diversity and the transition to a clean energy system. The story revolves around Amy’s mission to deliver the post across the island of Energia. The analogy of the story is that the delivery of the post is like the delivery of electricity.
Assisting Amy in her mission are four animals, called Clyde, Sol, Gale, and Snowy. Each of these animals represents a specific type of electricity technology. This page unpacks each of these analogies.
Explainer – Who is Amy?
Amy’s Balancing Act, is a fable about the power of diversity and clean energy. The story revolves around a girl’s mission to deliver mail across the island of Energia. The girl’s name is Amy, which is the first hint at who she represents in the story’s analogy to the clean energy transition.
Continue readingCheck your mirrors: 3 things rooftop solar can teach us about Australia’s electric car rollout
“The electric vehicle transition is about more than just doing away with vehicles powered by fossil fuels. We must also ensure quality technology and infrastructure, anticipate the future and avoid unwanted outcomes, such as entrenching disadvantage.
Australia’s world-leading rollout of rooftop solar power systems offers a guide to help navigate the transition. We’ve identified three key lessons on what’s gone well, and in hindsight, what could have been done differently.”
Full piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/check-your-mirrors-3-things-rooftop-solar-can-teach-us-about-australias-electric-car-rollout-162085
REVS video for CAETS competition
Communicating big issues and big projects into a short video is always a challenge. Tackling this one with the incredible Rosemary Barnes was a total blast.
This video introduces the role of #electricvehicles in the #smartgrid and how #v2g can provide valuable #gridservices. It also provides a perspective on how the fast dynamics of #inverters and #batteries are well suited to managing #gridstability.
Filmed for a competition with the Australian Academy of Technology & Engineering
Microgrids: how to keep the power on when disaster hits
It’s timely to consider how we can build a better system – one that’s more resilient in times of disaster and also doesn’t contribute, through carbon emissions, to making disasters more frequent.
One part of the solution is more connectedness, so one transmission line being severed is not the crisis it is now.
But just as important is ensuring connectedness isn’t crucial.
This means moving away from centralised systems – powered by a few big generators – to decentralised ones, with many local and small-scale generators. Instead of one big grid, we need many microgrids, interconnected but able to operate independently when necessary.
Full Piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/microgrids-how-to-keep-the-power-on-when-disaster-hits-130534
Get in on the ground floor: how apartments can join the solar boom
While there are now more solar panels in Australia than people, the many Australians who live in apartments have largely been locked out of this solar revolution by a minefield of red tape and potentially uninformed strata committees.
In the face of these challenges, Stucco, a small co-operative housing block in Sydney, embarked on a mission to take back the power. Hopefully their experiences can serve as a guide to how other apartment-dwellers can more readily go solar.
Full piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/get-in-on-the-ground-floor-how-apartments-can-join-the-solar-boom-79172
Owners of electric vehicles to be paid to plug into the grid to help avoid blackouts
Electric vehicles can help keep the air clean in our cities – as we’ve seen recently with the reduction of traffic through COVID-19 lockdowns – but they face two obstacles.
In the short term they’re still expensive. In the long term charging millions of vehicles from the electricity grid presents challenges.
I’m part of a new project, launched today, that tackles both of these obstacles head-on, and it could mean owners earn more money than they’re likely to pay for charging their electric vehicles.
Full piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/owners-of-electric-vehicles-to-be-paid-to-plug-into-the-grid-to-help-avoid-blackouts-132519
ATSE Extreme Science Show
After the success of the Optics in the Outback science outreach tour, Owen and I were hired to run a outreach show as part of the 2013 Australian Academy of Technology & Engineering “Extreme Science” event at the Melbourne Exhibition Center.
I sadly don’t have any footage from our show, but ABC science journalist Bernadette Hobbs had this to say about it:
Continue readingLight is an area of science that so often ends up in the ghetto of prisms and diagrams, but your team’s workshop was outstanding. The fact that I can still remember most of what you guys did two months ago speaks volumes about how creative and exciting your show was!
You brought light to life – the ‘Survivor’-style flame torch demonstrating wave motion was spectacular. The kids were hooked from that moment. And I’ve got to say the total internal reflection demo with laser light in a stream of water was simple and incredibly effective. You could see the light switch on in those minds.
ABC piece on EV policy
Excerpt from ABC TV interview on Australian EV policy has been featured in an online story here.
“The fact that Australia has a small number of people in a global market — that hasn’t stopped us from being world-leading in adopting solar.
“We’re one of the world leaders in adopting home batteries — there’s no reason why we can’t get the latest and greatest in electric vehicles as well.”