New frontiers in clean energy

Given the pressing need for Australia to find alternatives to fossil fuels, and the rapidity of our energy transition, the world of future energy is a heady one, full of wild-sounding ideas, innovation and experimentation, with an array of disparate tech and brands for consumers and industry to sort through. As a forum for these ideas and products, the renewable energy expo Energy Next can feel like stepping into the near future, even though many of the ideas being presented are currently being trialled or put into practice.

I visited on the second day of the event, when I encountered talks exploring the benefits of microgrids, virtual power plants, ‘Superhybrids’ and hydrogen.

Pushing the envelope with VPPs

With more and more businesses and homeowners adopting solar batteries, virtual power plants (VPPs) are becoming a hot topic. To form a virtual power plant, you need a collection of solar PV and solar battery owners who agree to form a network, coordinated by underlying software, that provides excess power to the grid at times of need. In addition to the benefit of grid stabilisation, this allows participants in the VPP to potentially earn some money from the solar they produce.

In his talk on VPP Innovation for grid providers and customers, Alex Georgiou charted the history of ShineHub, the Australian solar tech company he co-founded with solar engineer Jin Kim. Beginning as a solar retail company that centralised all aspects of solar installation for the customer in the one online hub, ShineHub has since grown various sibling companies under the banner of GTL Group — one of these (released in 2020) is an independent VPP, meaning that users do not have to partner with an electricity retailer in order to be part of the virtual power plant.

When GTL introduced its cloud-based VPP in 2019 — the first in Australia, according to Georgiou — customers had to pay for hardware and there were relatively few takers. This changed when the company shifted its model so that it would pay its VPP customers 45c for every kWh the VPP drew from their household battery and fed into the grid (this has lately risen to 55c/kWh). This profit incentive resulted in a huge adoption rate, Georgiou said, with up to 95% of the company’s customers coming onboard at that time.

Since its inception, ShineHub has gone on to become a major player in battery storage deployment (especially residential), installing 40 MWh of batteries and helping to prevent another South Australian blackout, according to Georgiou.

ShineHub’s comprehensive approach stems from a desire to make things easier for companies who are trying to get into batteries from scratch:

“We built these software systems for the integration between products, systems and grid, to be able to really easily facilitate the positive adoption of these batteries,” Georgiou said.

EVs: giant, mobile batteries

Electric vehicles present another opportunity for helping to stabilise the grid and participate in the energy market.

“In the same way that batteries can be used for virtual power plants in the home, car batteries can be used for virtual power plants wherever they’re located,” Georgiou said. A major challenge for making EVs part of a VPP, however, is that there are huge penalties from VPP markets if back-up power is not available for the grid when needed.

But Georgiou was confident these problems can be ironed out. He envisaged a situation where someone drives their EV to the mall, plugs it in, leaves it to recharge and makes their money off the virtual power plant while shopping. It’s a solution “that’s not that far away”, he said.

Microgrids to the rescue?

Jey Shivakumar, Principal Engineer, Energy Transformation Services at the engineering firm Cossill & Webley, spoke about decarbonisation in a Western Australian context, where the state’s major utility Synergy has been given a large sum of money to close down coal-generated energy.

Letting the utilities handle Australia’s energy transition on their own is not the best option, according to Shivakumar, especially not in a large state like WA that is not fully interconnected. With 4000 km of transmission network still needed, challenges for utility-scale solar PV, wind and hydro include the need for large-scale transmission line upgrades as well as access to easements and sizeable tracts of land.

While one solution is to let individuals arrange their own solar installations, probably with distributed energy resources (DER) like solar PV and batteries, this is not the most reliable system given a plethora of different brands and infrastructures, Shivakumar said.

Could microgrids help to fill the gap? Microgrids are small enough not to be burdened by the problems faced by large energy providers, yet big enough to be able to take advantage of energy sharing. At the moment, however, there is a fair bit of uncertainty around how microgrids are run (Shivakumar described it as a “Wild West mentality”), including the grey area of how much a utility needs to be involved, as well as making sure customers are protected downstream. There is a need for more regulation, governance and protection of customers. Into the future, though, Shivakumar believes the knowledge gained from microgrids can be passed on to utilities.

‘Superhybrids’: pulling everything together

Picture the energy transition and you probably see solar and wind farms; photovoltaic panels on roofs; batteries; and, taking on an increasingly prominent role, hydrogen. But what if multiple energy sources could be pulled together in the one power plant?

Enter the Superhybrid, a solution developed by carbon-free energy company Sunshine Hydro and introduced at Energy Next by the company’s Executive Chairman Michael Myer in his talk, ‘Superhybrids’ Role in Australia as a Green Superpower’.

A Superhybrid can be thought of as an ecosystem, Myer said, combining traditional pumped hydro with wind, solar, hydrogen electrolysis, liquefaction and fuel cells, with the aim of producing 24/7 carbon-free energy. (A Superhybrid is capable of producing the same almost-100% carbon-free energy as a nuclear power station, but more cost-effectively, according to Sunshine Hydro.) It provides ‘deep’ energy storage: more than 15 hours. Crucially, the ecosystem is coordinated and optimised by the company’s AESOP software, developed over the past seven years. While a Superhybrid is thought of as a single piece of infrastructure, parts of it can be divided between different companies.

Sunshine Hydro currently has several Superhybrid projects planned in Australia, including the $2bn Djandori gung-i hydropower project near Miriam Vale within the Central Queensland Renewable Energy Zone, for which development applications are being prepared.

Other areas of interest

Other presentations at Energy Next looked at the potential role of hydrogen, which has considerable funding behind it at the moment (including the federal government’s $2 billion Hydrogen Headstart initiative for green hydrogen projects). Solar technology featured heavily, as might be expected, and there was plenty of focus on EVs (charging infrastructure, as well as electric vehicles’ role as energy storage systems).

Energy data — and systems for capturing it, such as GTL’s VPP and Sunshine Hydro’s AESOP software — was a key theme throughout the conference. In her talk on a real-time marketplace for energy data, Grace Young, Chief Innovation Officer at Wattwatchers Digital Energy, examined the multiple issues that need to be balanced when collecting, aggregating and sharing energy data from homes and businesses in real time, including security and privacy concerns.

In fact, if there was one major takeaway from Energy Next, it was the necessity of having good underlying software to log and coordinate the movement of renewable energy as it makes its way flexibly from solar panel, battery, EV, wind farm or pumped hydro and into a rapidly changing grid.

Energy Next took place on 18–19 July 2023 at ICC, Sydney.

Image credit: iStock.com/vm