This excellent piece in pv magazine covers a lot of ground across medium-scale/community batteries with a host of voices.
My comments in the article (key ones copied below) foreshadow some work I’ll be putting out in the coming month analysing the relationships between medium-scale batteries and equity, sustainability and resilience.
Continue readingWe have a new paper published today in Energy Research & Social Science.
Pre-print is freely available below and the published paper is available at https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1ely67tZ6ZxQoB
Continue reading
If networks could charge for localised use of their service, all customers in areas with high PV and community-scale batteries would pay lower bills … with no cost to the network, research shows.
Is rooftop solar a problem in the suburbs? Apparently so, with rising PV exports prompting falls in feed-in tariffs, plans for export charges in Adelaide and deployment of community-scale batteries in many cities.
As the grid transitions away from coal, it seems as though rooftop solar is part of the solution and part of the problem at the same time. Is there a simple solution that could see all that excess solar energy shared equitably and leave customers better off?
Yes, there is. Or there could be, if networks were allowed more flexibility in how they charge for their services.
Full story in ecogeneration
Stoked to have our article on responsible innovation of algorithms for the digital energy era featured on the cover of Nature Energy. Full text is available for free using this link https://rdcu.be/cpu0G
Ecogeneration interview about our Nature Energy paper on battery algorithms
Research shows that if energy professionals and customers agree on what they expect a community battery to do, engineers can write performance algorithms to suit those objectives.
Can you trust a battery to make the best decisions about when to charge and discharge? It depends who owns it, for a start, but most of all it depends who wrote the code that is its book of commands.
As community batteries are deployed to manage solar exports and calm grid disturbances, researchers at the Australian National University wanted to understand the degree to which these assets can be bent to serve their owners or the communities they are plonked in the middle of.
“How an electric vehicle or a battery operates in your home, these things are governed by algorithms coded up by humans,” says ANU battery storage and grid integration research leader Bjorn Sturmberg. “They are not governed by the physics of spinning machines, which is traditionally what we have built our energy system around.”
Continue readingOur new paper in Nature Energy asks fundamental questions of what values and biases algorithms are encoding into our digital energy system.
Abstract below:
The digital energy era presents at least three systemic concerns to the design and operation of algorithms: bias of considerations towards the easily quantifiable; inhibition of explainability; and undermining of trust and inclusion, as well as energy users’ autonomy and control. Here we examine these tensions through an interdisciplinary study that reveals the diversity of possible algorithms and their accompanying material effects, focused on neighbourhood-scale batteries (NSBs) in Australia. We conducted qualitative research with energy sector professionals and citizens to understand the range of perceived benefits and risks of NSBs and the algorithms that drive their behaviour. Issues raised by stakeholders were integrated into NSB optimization algorithms whose effects on NSB owners and customers were quantified through techno-economic modelling. Our results show the allocation of benefits and risks vary considerably between different algorithm designs. This indicates a need to improve energy algorithm governance, enabling accountability and responsiveness across the design and use of algorithms so that the digitization of energy technology does not lead to adverse public outcomes.
Full text available here https://rdcu.be/cpu0G