Today was the first day of Australian Soar Council’s 53rd annual conference and exhibition, and it was a great start to the two day event. With three conferences running simultaneously all day and dozens of exhibitors, there was plenty to check out. The three conferences were divided into three streams: Policy, Professional Development, and Energy Storage. While the first two conferences had some excellent speakers and topics, I ended up spending much of my time at the Energy Storage conference.
Energy Storage is set to be the next big growth area in the renewable energy field. Attendees of the conference today would have witnessed just how far the hardware technologies have come in recent years, as well as how confident industry leaders are in the potential for distributed energy storage to completely change the energy landscape. A recurring theme with the talks was the transition from centralized, linear energy generation to distributed, digitized energy generation and usage.
The energy systems of the future will no longer consist of a few large generation facilities with networks across large areas to reach consumers, but of thousands of smaller generation “nodes” that are located closer to where energy is used, and can be owned by those that use the energy. One of the most disruptive examples of this is a household or building that generates energy from solar units and stores the excess energy for later use.
Rooftop solar makes it possible for consumers to produce their own energy at some points throughout the day, but when solar is paired with energy storage it provides greater flexible and potential for consumers to become even less reliant on the grid.
This may sound like bad news for the utility companies, and in the short term indeed it could mean sunken costs in infrastructure that has not paid itself back yet, but in the medium to long term it could mean less investment in infrastructure upgrades, capacity, and most importantly a reduction in peak load demand. Even with widespread adoption of solar and energy storage, there will be a need for large-scale utilities to provide services such as system management, and ultimately energy security.
The next decade will be a very exciting one that presents a great opportunity to overhaul the current energy grid and build a more sustainable one, where consumers have more options and flexibility when it comes to their energy. Policy and regulation are of course a major hurdle, but it is encouraging to attend events like the Solar 2015 Conference and Exhibition where industry leaders are working together to overcome obstacles and solve problems that seemed impossible only a few years ago. Exciting times!
RE Projects 