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.”

Let’s face it, the choices imbedded in algorithms are “relatively arbitrary”, Sturmberg says. Designers may want to test the constraints of a technology while maximising revenue (or minimising cost), but their decisions will be biased. Because they are human, of course, those biases will be obscure to them. That’s just how we are.

Full story here: https://www.ecogeneration.com.au/obey-your-master-how-algorithms-can-steer-a-neighbourhood-battery/