Summary of attended seminars and learnings (Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre 23-24.10.19)

The event overall was a pretty large collection of exciting agendas and people. The exhibition itself was held alongside the Energy Efficiency Expo and the Waste Expo, which was complementing. Of the two days I attended four conference seminars:
- Electric Vehicles (EVs): What’s happening in Australia to date — On the ground experience in the EV market
- Innovative Energy Technology: What we can look forward to, global innovations, and different energy models (AI & Energy 4.0)
- Finance: Power Price Forecasting
- Smart Grid: Technical Innovation and Future Modelling
The last two presentations I found the most interesting, thought provoking and probably most cohesively presented but I shall summarise the key points and my perspectives on all seminars.
Electric Vehicles (EVs):
According to Bloomberg’s estimates, in 2040 Australia will have a 40% uptake of EVs compared to internal combustion engines (ICEs). This falls behind the estimated global uptake of 55%. It could be the charging problem where it would require a larger upfront investment to charge at home or a much larger boost to increase the number of public EV charging stations. Nationally we have around 800 electric charging points compared to the 6000+ petrol stations so to make the EV option stand out for consumers there needs to be a much larger incentive. The debate to lean towards more public charging are the benefits that EVs could give as demand response e.g. to smooth out the duck curve on the rise of more renewable energy. The case study presented was rideshare drivers in California, where 85% of them have no chargers at home and charge during their off peak times during the day. This had led to helping CAISO avoid midday solar curtailment in the GWhs. With the presentation by ABB on industrial electric vehicles too, it’s very exciting to see how EVs evolve to play a role in energy security and reliability through demand response.
Problems with charging came mainly as behavioural management and uniform standards. DC fast charging options leads to spiky loads and the average 9–5 working class would charge in the evenings or overnight; the speaker Paul Fox talked of tariff sandboxes to encourage flat-lining and dynamic charging though personally I think there’s a lot more to look into in terms of consumer psychology than pure price influence. With software standards, a woman comically raised her annoyance of investing in an EV 2 years ago and now it doesn’t support CCS2 charging. Tesla also uses it’s own charger CHAdeMO. Do we aim for Australia wide coherency or set a single standard globally?
Questions I had were mostly regarding EV and taxes. A recent article by Angus McCrone (Chief Editor BloombergNEF) sums up some of my queries.
Innovative Energy Technology:
Honestly speaking, I found this session underwhelming from the perspective that I actively follow data and technology development trends. A lot of buzz words were thrown around and distant high tech user examples were presented (e.g. Google using deep mind machine learning for wind data forecasting to predict 36hrs in advance to influence decisions taken in the energy market showed a 20–30% step up in efficiency). What I felt was that a large portion of the audience were foreign to the technology and tools available but were very keen to see what worked and could be implemented to bring them greater gains. It was hard for the speakers to present to such a varied audience as noted in the blockchain segment, where the speaker Jikku Jose was trying to relate the audience to blockchain by saying it’s a database. Technically I’m going to say yes, but it leads to a lot of misunderstandings and assumptions because the foundations of block chain being immutable and decentralised make it fundamentally not the same. A simple article here describes the details much better.
I didn’t have a chance to ask in the conference but I’m very interested to know some of the cyber security controls and measures they are using when developing or implementing “smart” technologies. To the general public it may seem like a privacy issue but having read about Stuxnet, making our 20th century equipment accessible via APIs brings the threat landscape a lot more to home. Is there a difference in implementing cyber security controls for energy assets compared to a standard application or are there deeper loopholes such as in the hardware of generator controllers that we haven’t looked into? Purely hypothesising and would love to know more.
Finance:
This seminar though termed price forecasting, mostly focused on the rising distributed energy resource (DER) pricing following the Wholesale Demand Response Mechanism and AEMO’s DER Technical Integration Report. A shout out to Lance Hoch (Oakley Greenwood) for his dense and well prepared presentation on pricing structures for different distributed energy resource (DER) services in the value chain. He presented the pricing triangle consisting of: admin costs, thresholds accounting for geographical differences and price signal complexity. A suggestion was looking at consumers paying for the “capacity” to export rather than by demand to shift the pricing structure driven by peak demand in a high export, low demand situation. The next speaker Gilles Walgenwitz (Energetics) also echoed in switching to a “capacity market” from an energy market, where dispatched average weighted price compares better than strike price in considering long term hedges. He mentioned that this would be more encouraging for DER investments.
Smart Grids:
The main learning from this session was that consumers (and prosumers) love simplicity. Ian Waight (Solar Analytics) talked about trialling a peer to pool model dashboard for shared solar for a community in NSW. The overall earnings weren’t significant for the “suppliers” having PVs (~$5) and the engagement with the dashboard itself wasn’t super but it was important for the community that they liked to be contributing or interacting with the neighbours — knowing that “I’ve supplied power to John today” feeling. As prices of PVs have dropped the onboarding of keen consumers isn’t hard. Changing their behaviours or allowing them to be made aware of “energy” is the hard part and how smart meter data is used across distributors and retailers, whether in a top-down cohesive collaborative manner or developing individualised consumer focused products, the benefits to be energy aware needs to be more than cost.
Another speaker I really enjoyed hearing from the conference was Irishman Dr Paddy Finn (Electricity Exchange), where he talked about demand response decisions and control mechanisms that make customers more reliable, controllable and predictable. Ireland gives a higher demand response return for faster responders e.g. reducing demand within the 500ms tripping window incentivises participants who can reduce within 150ms because they get paid 3 times more greatly reduces the frequency rock off and it helps address FCAS supply. With the system moving towards a ore asynchronous based generation there’s got to be smarter ways to manage demand.
