Posts Tagged → academic

Reflections on 6 years at ANU

I’ve chosen to finish up at The Australian National University this week. Some, incomplete, reflections on the six years there:

  • The role of open data and models has never been more crucial. My code is https://github.com/bjornsturmberg and I recently got permission to share 2 household data sets https://zenodo.org/records/14885589
  • I still chuckle at getting a Bluey into the Quarterly Essay in my response to Saul Griffiths essay. I’m all for electrification but the emphasis shouldn’t be placed on numbers and machines, for as Chilli Healer says “if there’s no trust, none of this [the world] is possible . . . No libraries, no roads, no power lines.” https://bjornsturmberg.com/response-to-saul-griffiths-the-wires-that-bind/
  • I had never expected to write a kids book. Nor would I have imagined how Amy’s Balancing Act would take me to Parliament (as Craig Reucassel says, it’s “a great book to teach young children and old politicians about clean energy”), Australia’s largest music festival, and lots of schools (well that last part was predictable). I’ll always be endebted to those who supported the kickstarter campaign and to Cool.org for leveraging the story into teaching resources that have reached over 45,000 kids. https://bjornsturmberg.com/amys-balancing-act/ (there are only 2 boxes of the first edition left…)
  • I remain sceptical that giving something the prefix ‘community’ makes it deliver community benefit. https://bjornsturmberg.com/community-batteries-a-discussion-paper/ 
  • That an Australian electric vehicle fleet would have 5 times the energy storage capacity of Snowy 2.0 boggles my mind (so I refer to the calculation https://reneweconomy.com.au/are-19-million-electric-vehicle-batteries-equal-to-five-snowy-2-0s-61400/). 
  • The contribution of the REVS project in driving V2G from concept to commercial proposition in Australia is something I – and everyone in the consortium – will always be proud of. https://bjornsturmberg.com/category/transport/vehicle-to-grid/
  • The passion, talent, energy and compasionate leadership of students is radical. They’re truly our hope for the future. It’s been an honour to be the academic champion of the ANU solar for 5 years (3 team iterations, 2 car designs, builds and 1 world solar challenge – the next one being but weeks away, go team!)
  • Transdisciplinarity is hard to spell, harder to enact, and harder still to get funded. Hats off to the new McCusker Institute, I’m sad to not see out my Fellowship year.
  • The totally equitable parental leave policy is outstanding, but ought to be the norm. I have been invaluably enriched by the good and the bad times during the time I took (and take) to do the bestest, hardest job. Annabel Crabb’s Men at Work essay is still my go to https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2019/09/men-at-work
  • Contributing to growing a team from 3 to over 30 staff was a blast. It’s cliche and true that nothing is more influential than who you work with, which holds for partners as well as staff and students. I’ve been lucky to have this reinforced through positive examples from wonderful people.
  • Shifting from organisational growth to sustainability is (surprisingly) tricky. Strategy and leadership structures have to evolve markedly.
  • There is so much more to do to align decarbonisation (and broader sustainability) with social justice. This is my best attempt to contribute https://bjornsturmberg.com/presentation-watt-price-equity/, which is further developed in an upcoming Perspective article.

Vehicle-to-grid response to a frequency contingency in a national grid

A paper published in npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport analysing the vehicle-to-grid response to a major grid disturbance in the Australian grid.

Abstract

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

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Presentation: Watt price equity?

IMHO, 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

202411-Sturmberg-Energy_equityDownload

And context of the VCOSS project is https://vcoss.org.au/projects/2024/01/energy-health-nexus/

Discussion with the ACT Chief Minister

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.

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Flat fees for flexible EVs

This study builds upon the recently published Unplugged is inflexible report to explore one avenue by which EV drivers could be incentivised to: 

  1. plug their EVs in for extended durations, and  
  1. permit their vehicles to be charged flexibly.  

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

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Ignore variability, overestimate hydrogen production – Quantifying the effects of electrolyzer efficiency curves on hydrogen production from renewable energy sources

In this new paper with Dan Virah-Sawmy and Fiona J Beck we show that neglecting the variable electrolyzer efficiency, as is commonly done in studies of green hydrogen, leads to significant overestimation of hydrogen production in the range of 5–24%

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319924020676

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of including (or neglecting) the variable efficiency of hydrogen electrolyzers as a function of operating power in the modelling of green hydrogen produced from variable renewable energy sources. Results show that neglecting the variable electrolyzer efficiency, as is commonly done in studies of green hydrogen, leads to significant overestimation of hydrogen production in the range of 5–24%. The effects of the time resolution used in models are also investigated, as well as the impact of including the option for the electrolyzer to switch to stand-by mode instead of powering down and electrolyzer ramp rate constraints. Results indicate that these have a minor effect on overall hydrogen production, with the use of hour resolution data leading to overestimation in the range of 0.2–2%, relative to using 5-min data. This study used data from three solar farms and three wind in Australia, from which it is observed that wind farms produced 55% more hydrogen than the solar farms. The results in this study highlight the critical importance of including the variable efficiency of electrolyzers in the modelling of green hydrogen production. As this industry scales, continuing to neglect this effect would lead to the overestimation of hydrogen production by tens of megatonnes.

Participation and sensemaking in electric vehicle field trials: A study of fleet vehicle-to-grid in Australia

We have just published a new article from the REVS V2G trial about how participants in a field trial – in this case, the fleet, sustainability and asset managers – make sense of and influence technologies when a group comes along wanting to deploy and test them.

We found unexpected effects which revealed insights about what configuration of V2G might be acceptable to fleet end users. If energy market participants want V2G to solve their problems (and make them profit), they need to do the flexibility work.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-grid is a niche technology that has the potential to benefit electricity markets and support more renewable energy in the grid. However, interest from prospective users in adopting V2G is not well understood, particularly in the context of fleet vehicles. Technology-oriented field trials can contribute to the development of niche technologies. Trials usually focus on making engineered systems work, institutional embedding and testing business models. However, through the participation of users they also provide the opportunity to explore processes of problem definition and the formation of social, ethical and cultural meanings. This article presents findings from the Realising Electric Vehicle-to-grid Services project, an Australian trial of vehicle-to-grid in a government-owned light passenger car fleet, aiming to explore co-productive processes as essential aspects of participatory technology development. Our data comprises interviews with organisational actors responsible for facilitating and mediating the trial, as well as others in similar organisational roles. Adopting ecologies of participation as a framework, it reveals the productive effects of these actors in mediating the local embedding of vehicle-to-grid. These findings challenge the framing of vehicle-to-grid as being a question of consumer acceptance and suggest that, for this promising technology to contribute to a more sustainable future, the electricity sector must accept more risk.

Full article: https://lnkd.in/eukchts2