Energy Management Systems

After decades of continual blackouts and bushfires the Murrays decided enough was enough. They installed Redflow batteries to team up with their solar installation to take their farm off-grid and independent.

“This has been one of the most challenging summers on record …” begins the communique from Friday’s meeting of the COAG Energy Council. The Coronavirus could achieve what drought and bushfires failed to bring about — a coordinated governmental and industry response to ensuring that our energy system — irrevocably in transition towards renewables — becomes more secure, reliable and fit for purpose along the way.

The Australian Government’s “Economic Response to the Coronavirus” incentivises commercial and industrial solar PV uptake.

A consortium of partners led by the University of Technology Sydney has been successful in its bid for funding of a Cooperative Research Centre dedicated to enhancing energy consumers’ access to and efficient deployment of distributed renewable resources — primarily rooftop PV.

With a Commonwealth MoU in hand and a ‘flexible’ attitude to the regulatory processes governing transmission build in Australia’s National Electricity Market, the NSW Department of Planning and Environment is revving up its plans to develop a demonstrator Renewable Energy Zone.

Australia’s distributed energy resources — rooftop solar, batteries, smart devices — have become a force to be reckoned with, and AEMO has opened its DER Register to help integrate consumer assets into what is expected to become the world’s most sophisticated two-way energy market.

The ARC Research Hub for Integrated Energy Storage Solutions has a broad research mandate as it looks for innovative energy storage solutions for the energy transition, but some of the nation’s finest minds are now working on them together.

Many more renewable generators than originally thought are in a holding pattern as a result of oscillation problems in the weak-grid, high-resource area known as the West Murray. State Governments, AEMO and the renewables industry have hunkered down to find solutions that will also find application elsewhere in the grid as connection fever mounts.

PXiSE says its microgrid controller technology is successfully managing the output of a solar farm and a grid-scale battery in coordination with a gas power station in the coastal town of Onslow. It now readies for the next stages of deployment of its software solution across Horizon Power’s network.

The economics of energy supply are subject to a host of variable factors — including steady reductions over time in the costs of solar, wind and battery technology. Last week Rystad Energy published analysis of the proposed electrification of Curtis Island LNG plants and government assertions that such an energy swap would release substantial gas supplies for domestic use, lower gas prices and reduce carbon emissions…