Posts Tagged → media

The Fifth Estate – Tackling solar for renters

A series of grants totaling over half a million dollars have been awarded to researchers from four institutions to delve into making Australia’s energy markets more fair and equitable.

“These projects have each demonstrated the potential to make significant positive impact in areas where consumers are currently not best served by the energy system,” Energy Consumers Australia chief executive officer Lynne Gallagher said.

With Australians who live in rental properties seven times less likely to have rooftop solar, researchers from Australian National University (ANU) have been granted $77,070 to discover and advise on what policies will best address the discrepancy.

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New project: Policies for solar for rentals

Exploring ways for renters to benefit from solar power and renewable energy transition is the focus of a new project at The Australian National University (ANU).

Led by Dr Lee White, Mara Hammerle and Dr Bjorn Sturmberg, the project, How can we involve renters in the renewable energy transition in Australia? has secured funding from Energy Consumers Australia.

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New project: Southcoast Microgrid Reliability Feasibility (SµRF)

The Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program at the Australian National University, along with project partners Southcoast Health and Sustainability Alliance, network operator Essential Energy, and technology company Zepben, are delighted by news of successful project funding under the Regional and Remote Communities Reliability Fund (RRCRF) – microgrids 2020-21. 

The Southcoast Microgrid Reliability Feasibility (SµRF) project will engage NSW South Coast Eurobodalla residents, businesses, and Essential Energy in planning the transition from a bushfire exposed grid to a resilient grid of islandable microgrids.  

The project partners will receive $3.125M in funding over three years under the RRCRF to: 

  • conduct community-led design of future energy systems, quantifying the value of reliability;  
  • model the operation of eight microgrids across the region using high-resolution monitoring data and develop a holistic assessment of implementation costs; and 
  • explore business models and regulatory innovations to improve feasibility implementation. 
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Obey your master … how algorithms can steer a neighbourhood battery

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.”

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Stories from the opening of the DERlab

More renewable technology will be able to be integrated into Australia’s energy grid, thanks to a new state-of-the-art laboratory in Canberra.

The Australian National University’s Distributed Energy Resources Lab, which was opened on Tuesday, will allow for researchers, energy companies and start-ups in the industry to test their technology in real-world settings before they become built in to the broader energy grid.

The laboratory has been a project more than two years in the making, with more than $1.5 million in funding provided by the ACT government.

Full story in The Canberra Times

Our spin on it in The ANU Newsroom below

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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

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

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.”