Rewired podcast – Solar pioneer breaks down his game-changing invention

The RayGen founder joined Rewired to discuss how an idea he developed in his shed has just attracted $42 million in capital and will soon be deployed on the site of AGL’s Liddell Power Station.

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His “solar thermal” technology concentrates sunlight to central solar PV receivers to produce electricity, while employing an innovative approach to capture the heat byproduct to provide long term energy storage.

“So if you take a battery system, I want to run that for 10 or 24 hours, the cost is going to be pretty prohibitive…”

RayGen’s system can provide power on demand over long periods of time, while also helping to strengthen the grid in a similar way to synchronous generators like coal and gas plants.

The technology offers a way to tackle declining system system strength associated with the growth of inverter-based renewables like wind and solar that are replacing fossil fuel power stations. New approaches are needed to replicate the services offered by conventional power plants where spinning turbines provide “system strength” that helps to resist voltage fluctuations and keep the lights on.

“This guy’s a bit crazy”

Dr Lasich has seen the cost of solar fall drastically over time as the technology has grown from a niche curiosity to a vital contributor to global energy supplies.

“When I first started in solar way back in the 70s, solar was only one step away from witchcraft or alchemy, really. When I started looking at it, in the university, people thought that was okay, because it was research, but a lot of other people thought, you know, this guy’s a bit crazy.”

RayGen expects that its technology will be able to achieve costs below $100 per megawatt hour. ARENA has also supported other forms of grid scale storage, including the $100 million Grid Scale Storage Funding Round, and Hydrostor’s project in Broken Hill which is looking to utilise compressed air for energy storage.

“So it [solar] used to cost 10 to 15 $20 a watt. Whereas now, for a full system, it’s something like $1 a watt. And worldwide, there might have been a few megawatts installed, whereas now there, there are hundreds of gigawatts, so that the landscape is completely different.”

They have attracted support from big names, with $27 million of private investment underpinning a recent $42 million capital raise, including backing from AGL, Photon Energy, Schlumberger, and Chevron.

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Rewired podcast: Is there a role for renewable gas in our homes?

The Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG) is investing in the technology, planning to transition its natural gas network to renewable hydrogen by around 2040.

With 15 years in the energy industry and a background as a chemical engineer, AGIG’s Head of Strategy and Innovation Kristin Raman is one of the quiet transformers having a big impact on the way we use energy.

She joined us to share some of AGIG’s plans and explain the role she sees renewable gas playing in the energy transition.

“If you want to maintain reliability and deliver that in a cost effective way, I think you have to have renewable gas as part of that solution.”

On the road

In May, ARENA announced that AGIG will receive up to $32.1 million for a project blending hydrogen into their gas network at Wodonga on the Victoria-NSW border.

The funding will support AGIG to install a 10MW hydrogen electrolyser powered by renewable electricity, reducing the emissions intensity of their gas pipelines that service 40,000 customers in the area.

On their pathway to reaching their renewable hydrogen target by 2040, AGIG aims to achieve a 10 per cent hydrogen blend by 2030.

“And we probably think that, you know, 10% is a really comfortable level for the appliances that we’ve got today.”

Together with other funding recipients Engie Renewables Australia and ATCO, the project is part of efforts to bring down the cost of hydrogen produced by electrolysis.

Currently the renewable gas costs significantly more to produce than alternatives derived from fossil fuels, partly down to the high cost of electrolysers.

“As many people might realise, at the moment, electrolysers are pretty much bespoke and built by hand, there is not a lot of automation in these factories.”

Together with further reductions in the cost of renewable electricity, there is an opportunity to bring the cost of hydrogen down as electrolyser technology becomes more common and demand grows for emissions free gas.

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Reducing emissions in heavy industry

Some of Australia’s largest energy users will be supported to reduce emissions in hard-to-abate sectors through the next stage of an ARENA-supported project.

ARENA is providing $2 million to ClimateWorks to assist with the next stage of the Australian Industry Energy Transitions Initiative (ETI), a program bringing together industrial energy users to reduce emissions across their supply chains.

A core group of companies have already signed up to participate. They include APA Group, Australian Gas Infrastructure Group, BHP, BlueScope, BP Australia, Fortescue, Orica, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy & Fertilisers and Woodside.

An additional group will help to enable the work, including Aurecon, AustralianSuper, CBUS, HSBC, NAB and Schneider, with BloombergNE joining the initiative as a research provider.

Collectively the companies that have signed on account for about 21 per cent of Australian industrial emissions and represent approximately 24 per cent of the ASX market value.

The initiative is focused on five supply chains across heavy industry — iron and steel, alumina and aluminum, other metals including lithium, copper and nickel, liquified natural gas and chemicals including plastics, fertilisers and explosives.

The Australian Industry Energy Transitions Initiative is looking to decarbonise industrial supply chains.

tThe sectors are big contributors to the economy and overall energy use, making up more than a quarter of Australia’s $160 billion in annual exports.

Extraordinary challenge

The Australian Industry ETI aims to build momentum for the transition to net zero emissions while also boosting the competitiveness of these industries in the long term.

Work undertaken so far has focused on mapping technologies, policies and key actors across the sectors, identifying key opportunities to reduce emissions in these hard-to-abate sectors.

This has revealed certain industries could access variable electricity costs of $20 to $30 MWh by 2050, and potentially far sooner, by matching production to available supplies.

Hydrogen electrolysers are seen as particularly well-suited to regions with variable electricity supplies, allowing green hydrogen to be produced for below $1.50/kg.

This opportunity could be captured by developing “decarbonised energy systems alongside a concentration of demand, investment, ports, industry knowledge and skills” to empower regions and enable key industries to thrive.

Promising technologies, including green steel and hydrogen, will now be explored further through pilot projects with industry.

ClimateWorks CEO Anna Skarbek said the initiative aims to support Australian industry to take up the opportunities in a decarbonised global economy.

“Getting to net-zero in the complex supply chains within these hard-to-abate sectors involves transformational solutions that are more than a single organisation can achieve alone as it requires simultaneous shifts of finance, investment and service providers,” Skarbek said.

“The Australian Industry ETI recognises getting to net-zero requires collective action. With Rio Tinto and HSBC Australia signing on, its partners now make up approximately a quarter of the total value of the Australian stock market.”

Growing coalition

ARENA’s newly announced funding builds on $300,000 provided in 2020 to help establish the Australian Industry ETI.

ARENA CEO Darren Miller said the program highlights the commitment of some of Australia’s biggest companies to be a part of the solution to reducing emissions.

“ARENA is proud to be supporting this initiative which will build momentum, and give industry confidence they will benefit from a low carbon Australian economy,” Miller said.

“It is exciting to see more industry partners signing on to the initiative so we can all collaborate, harness industry knowledge and identify pathways to net zero.“

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Rewired season four – Introducing Australia’s energy transformers

Season four of Rewired will introduce you to some of the people transforming Australia’s energy landscape that you might not have heard from before.

From startup founders disrupting traditional business models, to the people investing new technologies that could power our lives in the future, Rewired will give you unprecedented access to the front line in the energy transition.

“We’re at the start of a critical decade for the world and for Australia and to reach net zero emissions by mid century, we must take the steps now.”

Not just generation

We will hear how ARENA funding is helping to trial new ways of producing metals like steel and aluminium using renewable energy.

Experts will share progress commercialising technologies like renewable hydrogen and electric vehicles, which are finally achieving long-held potential.

And we will explore how Australia’s riches of wind and solar could unlock opportunities to undertake more energy-intensive processes onshore, creating jobs and wealth.

This is our most ambitious season to date, with twice as many episodes giving us the chance to showcase more of the ways Australia is unlocking a renewable energy future.

“At the end of the day, if you want zero emissions steel, or 100% green steel, you have to solve emissions at every part of that supply chain.”

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New age for industry, powered by renewable energy

Around the world, industrial energy users are embracing renewable energy. Global giants IKEA, Lego, Apple and Coca Cola are amongst hundreds of companies blazing a trail, making the RE100 pledge to power their operations entirely with renewables.

Closer to home more Australian manufacturers are seeing the benefits of cheap, dependable power – from food producers, to remote mine operators and even companies that produce chemicals in massive volumes.

In the final episode of this season of ReWired, we speak to one of the local businesses leading the way, trading their LPG powered boiler with a Danish-made biomass system. We hear from a Queensland business refining liquid fuels from waste products, and some now familiar voices help to put the bioenergy opportunity into context.

Crushing it with bioenergy

Manildra oilseed crushers MSM Milling need a lot of heat to power their plant, which supplies canola oil to their global customer base.

In the past, they produced steam with a boiler fuelled by LPG, but as director Bob Mac Smith explains, rising gas costs forced the company to look at alternative sources of energy.

“After the cost of the seed, which is the raw material, and labour, energy’s our next biggest expense. And we’re talking, you know, some millions of dollars a year, we spend on energy every year.”

The search led to Danish biomass specialists Justsen, who supplied the new boiler system and sent three technicians to central New South Wales to install it.

“It’s highly efficient and it’s been a terrific success, the whole thing.”

Powered by sawdust, wood chips, thinnings and other timber waste from nearby forestry operations, the system has delivered a 60 to 70% reduction in their thermal energy costs.

Biomass boiler as it arrived at MSM Milling's Manildra plant — The new biomass boiler as it arrived at MSM Milling’s Manildra plant

As well as delivering savings and reductions to their carbon footprint, the company’s willingness to embrace renewable energy has proven popular with their customers. This reflects findings from research commissioned by ARENA in 2017, which found that “three quarters of Australians would buy a product or service that was made with renewable energy over a comparable one that wasn’t.”

“The other really interesting part is that it’s been so well received by our customers and there’s been so much interest in the whole project.”

Turning sewage sludge and waste products into biofuel

Queensland’s Southern Oil is developing systems to convert unwanted, valueless waste products into renewable liquid fuels.

At their refinery near Gladstone, they are speeding up processes that naturally take millions of years to produce biocrude, which can be refined into biodiesel and even renewable jet fuels. With ARENA support, Southern Oil has built a laboratory and undertaken a pilot project, which has been successful and will be scaled up to produce between 12 and 15 megalitres of diesel every year.

Southern Oil's sewage plant in Gladstone, Queensland — Southern Oil’s sewage plant in Gladstone, Queensland

Gen 2 biofuels are fuels that are made to be indistinguishable from current fossil fuels. From a molecular level they’re exactly the same, from a use level in an engine that are exactly the same they will go into a diesel engine either with fossil diesel or without and your engine won’t know the difference.

The demonstration project they are working on now is using biosolids leftover from the sewage treatment process to produce biocrude, but they also see an opportunity to turn agricultural, forestry and even household waste into renewable fuels.

In this episode, Southern Oil’s Ben Tabulo explains that the renewable crude oil produced can be refined just like oil extracted from the ground and used in an engine like a normal fuel.

Are biofuels the answer?

Given biofuels can provide a renewable alternative for liquid fuels, can we expect to see them take off as the energy transition moves beyond electricity?

According to Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, biofuels have a role to play, but that large-scale wind and solar will do the heavy lifting in a future powered by renewable energy.

“I mean, the amount of energy that we need to run civilization is just huge. And we need agricultural land to produce agricultural products, not biofuel products.”

ARENA CEO Darren Miller agrees that biofuels won’t solve global energy needs, but explains they can help to replace fossil fuels in applications that are hard to electrify.

ARENA CEO Darren Miller stated “The modelling shows we need a lot more renewable energy sources than just what biofuels can provide. So I think like many things in the space, it’s not a one, one thing or the other. It’s both… we need to move all these things forward and innovate across these different supply chains and waste streams.”

He sees aviation as an opportunity, with liquid biofuels like those being developed by Southern Oil able to displace jet fuel.

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Back to the future with pumped hydro energy storage

In this episode of ReWired we take a deep dive into one of the oldest renewable energy technologies – pumped hydro.

More than a century on from the establishment of the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Department, hydro projects are back on the drawing board as a way to store energy for a future powered by renewables.

The new pumped hydro plants propose to use renewables to pump vast amounts of water to an uphill reservoir when energy demand is low, so it can be released to generate electricity at peak times when demand rises.

Unlike the hydroelectric plants that supply most of Tasmania’s energy today, the new projects will operate within a closed system. Instead of relying on dams built along rivers, the pumped hydro plants will be built “off-river”, circulating the same water over and over between two reservoirs.

Pumped Hydro Storage - How does it work infographic — Pumped Hydro Storage – How does it work infographic.

Since the volume of energy storage is only limited by the size of the two reservoirs, the technology is uniquely positioned to deliver energy storage at a massive scale. This will be vital as more of Australia’s energy supply comes from renewables which vary depending on the weather, with predictions from the Australian Energy Market Operator that 15 GW of energy storage will be needed within two decades.

In this episode, we hear from Hydro Tasmania CEO Steve Davy about the vision for the island state to become a national renewable energy powerhouse. Chief Scientist Alan Finkel and AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman share their insights into how pumped hydro will fit into the future energy mix, and ARENA CEO Darren Miller outlines some of the work underway to help this technology become commercial.

How could pumped hydro technology become the future?

While the technology that underpins pumped hydro is not new, there are only a few working systems around the country.

“There’s no real innovation in big pumped hydro schemes… it’s just that we haven’t done many of them – in fact, we haven’t built a plant in the last thirty, thirty five years in Australia”

The concept might be simple, but it has the potential to transform the electricity market. The two biggest projects being developed – Snowy 2.0 and Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation – will have a collective capacity of about 4500 MW. According to Snowy Hydro, the 2000 MW Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro facility could power three million homes for more than a week when operating at full capacity.

“As we’re moving away from coal and gas and what we call dispatchable resources… we can’t control the weather and that’s become our largest fuel resource.”

The large output and long duration makes pumped hydro well suited to complement large-scale renewables, with the capacity to store energy from windy and sunny periods for when generation drops.

While the wind might not always blow and the sun might not always shine, with enough storage it will be possible to meet our energy needs from renewables around the clock.

Connecting pumped hydro power stations to the people

One challenge is sending electricity from remote sites suited to large-scale pumped hydro facilities to distant population centres where it is needed. Tasmania’s plan to build the “Battery of the Nation” to bolster the National Electricity Market has a particularly big hurdle to overcome – Bass Strait.

We need roughly 20 gigawatts of battery storage in around 2040 timeframe, so we’re going to need a lot of pump storage projects around Australia and Tasmania certainly has an abundance of available sites.

With the existing BassLink interconnector at capacity, work is underway to make the case for a second connection to the mainland. The business case for the proposed “Marinus Link” is well-developed and the second connection could enter service as soon as 2027.

“The value we see going forward is as the coal retires, we’re going to want to make sure that we can export from the various states and import from the various states.”

To share energy from the eastern seaboard with South Australia, another link is being developed to run from near Wagga in New South Wales to Robertstown, north of Adelaide. Together with expansions to existing interconnectors between Queensland and New South Wales, and South Australia and Victoria, the future NEM is being designed to capitalise on the strengths of individual states.

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Storing renewable energy in the world’s biggest batteries

One of the biggest criticisms of renewable energy has been the simple fact that the output of wind and solar farms can vary depending on the weather and time of day.

When renewables made up a small part of the generation mix, that variability wasn’t a big problem. But as wind and solar do more of the heavy lifting, it is vital that we find ways of storing renewable energy for the times when less energy is being generated.

Listen to Storing renewable energy in the world’s biggest batteries

In this episode of ReWired: Solving the Energy Puzzle, we look at one of the newest – and most headline grabbing – large-scale storage technologies.

Back to the future

Just like the AA cells that historically powered devices like transistor radios, massive battery banks today are storing renewable energy in electric vehicles and increasingly offer a way to support the electricity grid.

“Batteries are unlike anything else that is on the system at the moment. They’re multifunctional, they can respond in milliseconds, they can provide a range of services.”

Edify Energy CEO John Cole tells us about the grid scale 25 MW / 50 MWh battery they have installed alongside their solar farm at Gannawarra in northern Victoria.

As well as powering 16,000 homes for two hours in the event of a major outage, the Gannawarra Energy Storage System is providing services that help to maintain a stable network frequency, which in turn boosts the system strength of the local grid.

“Edify’s mission is to produce as much clean green electricity as we can. We’ve done that originally through solar farms and now with storage devices.”

The system stores energy in more than 400 individual Tesla powerpacks, which contain about 6.5 million familiar looking battery cells.

Hand holding a cell found in the TESLA battery — One of approximately 6.5 million individual Tesla cells that make up the Gannawarra Energy Storage System

Storage helping to ‘firm’ renewable energy resources

As more energy is supplied by wind, solar and other variable renewable energy sources, batteries and other storage technologies are predicted to become an essential part of the energy landscape.

For the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the variability increases the degree of difficulty involved in keeping the lights on. In a paper released in mid 2019, AEMO predicted that Australia would need 15 GW of utility scale storage by the early 2040s.

In this episode, AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman shares her perspective on the role storage technologies like batteries have a role to play ‘firming’ the variable output of wind and solar farms, and helping to keep the lights on.

“For wind and solar, of course, our biggest fuel source is weather, which means that we want to take advantage of weather diversity. But we also need to make sure that because we know that the weather doesn’t always work quite the way we want it to, that we can firm those resources.”

While this is likely to come from a range of storage methods, it is becoming clear that batteries have a role to play. Within days of the official ribbon cutting ceremony at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia in 2017, the world’s biggest battery helped to arrest a drop in grid frequency when a massive unit failed at Victoria’s Loy Yang Power Station.

Within a year of operation, it became clear that the battery could provide frequency control ancillary services with lightning speed, reducing reliance on fossil fuel powered plants and saving tens of millions of dollars in FCAS costs.

Energy Efficiency Council Head of Policy Rob Murray-Leach tells us that having batteries compete in these markets is lowering costs for energy consumers.

“So what we’ve seen from the Hornsdale battery in South Australia is that they make the majority of their income at the moment from frequency control, which basically means very quickly increasing output or increasing intake of energy in order to balance the grid.”

With support from ARENA, the Hornsdale Power Reserve is now being expanded by 50 per cent. It is one of five big battery projects to receive ARENA funding, that are placing Australia at the cutting edge of the global commercialisation of battery technology.

“So we know from history, recent history, that the faster we deploy, the faster we improve the improvement curve.”

We also hear from Climateworks CEO Anna Skarbek, who believes that batteries will be an important part of the future energy portfolio. She says that flagship projects like the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia provide a glimpse of the future and help to shift the conversation around the energy transition.

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Australia’s renewable hydrogen industry prepares for take off

In this episode of ReWired, we explore how renewable hydrogen could be poised for its moment in the sun.

“This is not the first time that people have talked about using hydrogen, clean hydrogen as part of our energy supply….But I would put it to you, this time it’s different.” – Dr Alan Finkel

Despite being used industrially for more than a century, and seen as a fuel of the future since the 1970s, hydrogen is only beginning to emerge as a likely part of our energy toolkit.

While the potential has been well understood, the emergence of electrolyser technology powered by affordable and plentiful energy from the wind and sun is a potential game-changer.

“So we in Australia are blessed with huge amounts of sun and wind, and lots of land. And these are the ingredients needed for a renewable hydrogen energy industry.” – Darren Miller

The opportunity is coming into focus. Just as Australian resources have underpinned global industry for generations, energy from the wind and sun could be shipped offshore as energy importers transition to low emission fuels.

Stepping stone to decarbonised gas networks

Not only could hydrogen ‘soak up’ excess electricity generated by wind and solar, it offers a pathway to decarbonise gas networks.

Western Australian gas distributor ATCO has built the Clean Energy Innovation Hub at its headquarters in Perth. Now up and running, the Hub is producing green hydrogen from solar panels on site to blend with natural gas and test in domestic appliances.

The project is a stepping stone to decarbonising the existing gas grid, which ATCO’s Head of Innovation Sam Lee Mohan tells us accounts for a massive amount of energy consumed.

“The amount of energy that gas distribution provides to domestic homeowners here in Western Australia is almost two times the amount provided by the electricity network.” – Sam Lee Mohan

The project is helping to understand the tolerances of common household appliances, testing hydrogen blended with natural gas at different concentrations.

“The existing appliances in your home can actually handle a small amount of hydrogen – around 13 per cent – which would mean that 10 per cent of the network could be safely converted to hydrogen using current technology.” – Jane Ryan

This blending technology is also being tested at the Hydrogen Park SA in Adelaide, which aims to be injecting renewable hydrogen into a residential gas grid by mid-2020.

Opportunities for Australia’s renewable hydrogen industry beyond our borders

With Australia’s riches of wind and sun, we are well positioned to produce hydrogen at scale to share with the world. According to research that informed Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy, global demand could reach 300 million tonnes by 2050.

One country that sees a bright future for hydrogen is Germany. Managing Director of the German Energy Agency Kristina Haverkamp told us it’s clear that Germany will not be able to produce enough hydrogen to meet their future demand.

“It can be used in all our existing appliances. It can be used for heating houses, it can be used for driving cars, it can be used for flying airplanes. And all of this will not require substantive changes in our infrastructure.” – Kristina Haverkamp

Describing hydrogen as one of a suite of renewable, synthetic ‘powerfuels’, she believes it will be an important alternative to direct electrification in the pathway to a future powered by renewables.

Where do we start

Produced hydrogen with an electrolyser costs more than fossil fuel alternatives today, but ARENA is working hard to make the emerging technology commercial.

As well as investing $70 million into a new funding round, ARENA is supporting massive ammonia users like explosives manufacturer Dyno Nobel to explore whether it is possible to transition to using a renewable hydrogen feedstock.

“The development of renewable hydrogen, as an alternative economic supply of feedstock for ammonia manufacturing is absolutely the future of chemical manufacturing globally.” – Darren Jarvis

Incitec Pivot’s Vice President of Strategic Project Development Darren Jarvis told us these projects offer a pathway towards the vision of a hydrogen export industry.

“Export industries are what get created after you have a successful domestic industry.” – Darren Jarvis

The projects, supported by companies familiar with hydrogen that have established supply chains, aim to bring down the cost of electrolyser technology and help Australia’s renewable hydrogen industry to compete with non-renewable alternatives.

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Rewired podcast episode two – Together in electric dreams?

Rewired podcast episode two

Rewired podcast episode two is out now with a focus on electric vehicles.

Australia’s electric vehicle journey has started slowly, but more models are available than ever before and fast charging networks are taking shape.

For many, EVs are becoming a viable alternative. They do cost more upfront, but prices are coming down and are predicted to drop below that of an equivalent petrol car by the mid-2020s.

In this episode, we speak with Chargefox CEO Martin Andrews, who tells us that the technology has reached a point where he would choose an electric vehicle every single time.

“The experience is just incredible.”

His company is midway through construction of a 22 point intercity charging network. ARENA has provided $6 million in funding for the project, which is installing chargers between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, with additional points in Tasmania and Western Australia.

Their network of “ultra fast chargers” is 100 per cent powered by renewable energy, and able to fill a battery in as little as 15 minutes.

Can the grid cope?

ARENA CEO Darren Miller shares some of the work the agency is doing to prepare for the growing of EVs. He believes that electric motoring represents a great opportunity, but one that comes with some risks.

To prepare for these challenges, ARENA is supporting charging networks like Chargefox and EVie Networks, amongst a suite of DER projects that will help to prepare the electricity network for more electric vehicles.

For Dr Alan Finkel – Australia’s Chief Scientist and electric vehicle driver – the future is bright. “Wherever you can see a problem, I can see a solution,” he told us.

Big opportunity for Australia

According to Rob Murray Leach, Head of Policy at the Australian Energy Efficiency Council, the global transition to EVs is gathering steam.

“There’s been a really radical shift globally in just the last two years.”

Kristina Haverkamp, Managing Director of the German Energy Agency agrees. She told us that demand for electric vehicles is growing as attitudes change. She shares Dr Finkel’s confidence that the challenges can be managed, with people choosing to charge in different ways and at different times minimising the load on the grid.

These days electric vehicles are chic. Young boys 18, 19, 20. They don’t dream about buying a Porsche anymore. They dream about buying a Tesla.

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How to reduce your home electricity bill

How do I reduce my home home electricity bill? Well, Australia is at the forefront of the shift to small, domestic scale energy assets.

The growing array of ‘distributed energy resources’ is changing the way we produce and consume energy, and putting more power in the hands of consumers than ever before.

Listen to the first episode of ReWired podcast Season 3 below

Led by more than 2.2 million Australian households that have installed rooftop solar panels, what’s happening ‘behind the meter’ is starting to have wide-reaching impacts.

Distributed energy and your home electricity bill

Season three of the ReWired podcast launches with a deep dive into the world of distributed energy. We begin with the story behind a smart, highly efficient home in Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs that is almost entirely powered by solar generated on site.

We speak with Audrey Zibelman, the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). She outlines some of the challenges keeping the lights on as more of our power is produced from a variety of renewable sources.

We hear from ARENA CEO Darren Miller about how the agency is helping to prepare for the future of energy, and manage the transition to date.

And we will give you a sneak preview of some of the technologies that we believe will power our lives into the future.

A glimpse of the future

Take a moment to visualise what your home of the future might look like. Rooftop solar panels capturing energy from the sun to produce electricity. Smart appliances connected to an energy management system. Any excess electricity produced stored in a home or electric vehicle battery for later, when the sun might not be shining.

Combined with energy efficient designs, these cutting-edge technologies can maximise the value of power produced on your roof. If managed well, they can even make the grid stronger for everybody.

Our first guest, Howard Elston, has turned his smart home vision into a reality. In the place of a large old house in Ringwood East, he is building three solar powered homes packed with cutting edge technology.

They are designed to be highly energy efficient, capturing warmth from the sun during winter and keeping it out to stay cool during summer. Everything from the household appliances to his car are powered by the rooftop solar panels, with any excess energy produced stored in batteries.

It all adds up to a comfortable home that is cheap to run without the home electricity bill shock. That’s great for him, but the growing popularity of small, behind-the-meter energy assets is beginning to cause issues for the grid.

Too much of a good thing?

Australia’s energy grids were designed to send electricity in one direction. For decades power has flowed from large power stations in regional areas to our towns and cities, and the job of balancing supply and demand has been relatively straightforward.

Aside from occasional spikes in demand on the hottest summer days, the energy output from the power stations was predictable.

But that is changing as more electricity is generated behind-the-meter. The growth of solar has created two directional energy flows, as households send the excess power produced by their rooftop systems back into the grid.

For electricity networks and AEMO, this makes it harder to maintain the precise 50 hertz frequency that the grid needs to be stable and reliable.

Not only is demand less predictable, but authorities have less visibility over how households are consuming energy. That means they are less able to forecast demand for energy in the future.

And as AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman tells us in this episode, there is a new problem to worry about – low demand. She describes a vision for ‘responsive demand’, where incentives could be provided to run the washing machine or dishwasher during the day when solar production is high, but energy consumption is typically low.

Helping people reduce their home electricity bill

Throughout this season of the ReWired podcast, we will feature some of the ARENA funded projects that we think will have a big impact.

In episode 1, we speak to Jack Taylor from Allume. The Melbourne startup has developed the SolShare to unlock a massive new market for rooftop solar – apartments and multi-metered buildings. Their system allows tenants in apartment buildings, offices and retail centres to share equally in energy produced by a central solar array.

You will also hear from Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel and Anna Skarbek, the CEO of Climateworks.

We hope you enjoy these stories and learn something new.

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