December 24, 2024
After managing eleven posts in 2023 I’ve followed up with zero this year! This annual review serves as a quick re-cap of what I’ve been up to and to keep the “make a blog post every year” streak going. It covers work I’ve been involved in, general trends in the Australian DER industry, and some outlooks for 2025.
First though, a quick personal update. I did the adult triple-crown of: get married, buy a house and have a kid in the first half of the year. Apologies for any late replies, missed deadlines and meandering sleep deprived conversations in the back half of this year.
Babies make very stylish accessories:
CAPA Intelligence is a energy sector cybersecurity company that I have spent a lot of time helping build this year. We focus on identifying, monitoring and responding to digital supply chain risks. Electricity generation today is increasingly more distributed, and those assets often depend on various common service providers and digital tools. For example, a group of solar systems may all use the same solar forecasting provider, aggregator or smart site controller. If this year’s CrowdStrike outage taught us anything, it’s that outages and unexpected behaviour (either malicious or non-malicious) to vendors and systems that others depend on can have widespread and complex impacts.
CAPA has been working on tools and services to better understand and manage these risks in the electricity sector. We have projects and partners helping us develop these solutions and have been fortunate to build a great team with a lot of domain expertise that we can smoosh together to throw at this new problem.
I love to tell the story of when I, back in 2016 as a software developer, crashed a fleet of home energy management systems due to a bug I introduced. I thought there were 24 hours in a day and then a 23 hour day came along during a daylight savings change over and poof:
IndexError: list index out of range
The fleet at the time was small but I did think that as fleet sizes grew that we’ll need ways to manage these risks. I’m glad that almost 10 years later I get to work on part of a solution to that problem.
Optigrid is a university spinout that I’ve been helping this year commercialise their electricity price forecasting and battery optimisation software. This topic has always been close to my heart. My time at Reposit taught me a little about linear constraint programming and the importance of good forecasts for battery optimisation systems. Since then I’ve been looking around for good solutions to these problems.
The team is amazing, they raised an investment round with some great investors, customers are using the products, things are going well. I got to co-present at All Energy with the CEO Sahand about his paper (summary and link are here) characterising the current financial performance of batteries in the NEM. I also got to proselytize about the need for high quality scheduling and optimisation systems in order to get the best outcomes out of batteries to lower energy costs and run an efficient system, a topic I think is still misunderstood and underprioritised by many.
UPowr is a company I’ve helped out since COVID times, originally working on an ARENA project to make better virtual power plant products. One of the things I worked on with them this year was understanding how to adapt our processes for Victoria’s emergency solar backstop mechanism and New South Wales’ battery subsidy through the Peak Demand Reduction Scheme. These new schemes and requirements are just a few examples of how the sales, installation and operation of DER is becoming increasingly complex. I think companies like UPowr are extremely well positioned to manage that complexity.
And finally some consulting to governments and community groups through Grids Energy. One cool piece of work I got to do was pull out a lot of interesting analysis and statics from Round 1 of the Australian Government’s Community Batteries for Household Solar program. This includes community battery project costs, commercial models and risks. This is the only data source I know of that has such broad but detailed analysis of community projects, and the program is planning to share more data throughout the life of these projects.
Please reach out if you’d like to chat more about any of these companies, products or services :)
From a power system perspective in Australia, distributed energy resources are starting to hit the mainstream. They’re getting large enough in capacity, with mature enough technical and commercial solutions, that the industry (including government and market bodies) are starting to plan how they can continue to operate in a safe manner that has positive outcomes both for their owners and energy system users more broadly. Often this is called “integrating consumer energy resources”.
Better integration of these resources has been talked about for many years but now, often out of necessity, action must be taken. As is often the case, we’re slightly behind schedule in rolling out many of these solutions which can lead to some less than perfect roll outs. Some issues with the current Victorian emergency solar backstop implementation is an example of this. But action is being taken, and improvements are being made over time. No longer can we admire the problem which I think largely is a positive.
On the reforms side we’ve had many “building block” reforms which will create some scaffolding for DER products and applications to be built on top of. Over time we’ll see how effective they are:
Actually, that last one, the child meter, this reform involves my biggest surprise of the year. If you look at the ARENA Market Snapshot for the community battery funding round, pages 28-29, you’ll see “[behind the meter] projects tend to put the community battery on a ‘child meter’”. This is a setup where the community battery can reduce the network tariffs at site, but trade freely on the market, independent of the site. Here’s a diagram from the document:
This kind of model has been around for a while, but what’s notable to me is how many projects elected to use this approach! It greatly simplifies the customer product, it’s applicable to many sites as it doesn’t require solar and can accommodate many load shapes and “there is no need for complex tendering, registration and settlement”. I wonder whether this model, with some cost reductions and efficiencies could really take off and you see a gigawatt of C&I battery capacity rolled out relatively quickly using this model.
Also on the “commercial sites can more easily get a second retailer on a child meter”, many people (including me!) were disappointed that it was determined that residential sites cannot get a second retailer on a child meter. This means no EV charging retailer that’s different from your household energy retailer in the near future. While sad there is in my mind still hope, and I encourage anyone wanting to pursue that model to see if the AER wants to give you a trial waiver in a regulatory sandbox.
Finally, there is the CER Taskforce implementing the National Consumer Energy Resources Roadmap. Many priorities and things to be done, most to be completed in 2025-2027, we shall see how it goes.
I think 2025 will be similar to 2024, continued early rollouts and improvements to DER management tools like emergency backstops, another battery subsidy (perhaps federal!), but mostly continuing to work on laying the groundwork for those new, broadly accessible DER products and services to exist in a commercially viable way with positive and expected consumer outcomes.
Finally, a little new years resolution for me is to get more involved with others in exploring ideas and topics in the industry in a relatively relaxed manner. This may be book/journal clubs, dinners, very very small conferences. If you are involved in any of the things or would like to get one started, please feel free to reach out.
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