An introductory video to the DERlab
Posts Tagged → media
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.”
Continue readingStories 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
Continue readingEngineering with Rosie Vehicle-to-Grid Explainer
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.”
The Solar Project video
A short video of the Artist Farmer Scientist solar project
The AFS Newspaper
The AFS program has been wrapped into a striking, tactile newspaper. Here are the pages covering the solar farming project.
How an unlikely collaboration redefined a physicist’s approach to climate change
This piece was first published in Cosmos Magazine in December 2019
We generally hear climate change discussed as a technical challenge that will be solved with bigger wind turbines, more electric cars, less steak and fewer flights. The mission is nothing more, and nothing less, than to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent units.
As a physicist, this computes for me, but over the past year, I’ve begun to look at things differently.
Continue reading