Why a smarter grid is key to a renewable future: Matthew Priestley 🔌 | This Talk | ABC Australia

"The government needs to commit serious investment to addressing the challenges of using renewables now, or we may encounter serious problems."
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Australia doesn’t have a problem with generating renewable energy... but it turns out we do have a problem with using it. Our vast country has an almost infinite capacity for solar, wind, and hydro energy, but converting those forms of energy to function correctly within our existing electricity grids is going to be the real challenge. Switching to renewables is fundamental to combat climate change, so how do we overcome the technical challenges of integrating clean energy generation into our electricity grid and start utilising our country's wealth of clean energy?
Matthew Priestley
Matthew Priestley is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications in the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW Sydney. He received the Dean’s Award for outstanding PhD thesis and won acceptance to the Founders 10x Accelerator program in 2019. Through this program, he founded a technology start-up company called Motorica that was looking to commercialise specialised electric motor designs for safety-critical applications. Priestley has been working in the research areas of safety-critical motor drive systems and converter grid synchronisation systems. He is passionate about developing robust synchronisation of high amounts of renewable energy sources to the electricity distribution network.
A UNSW Centre for Ideas project, with illustrations designed by Juune Lee and footage filmed at the EPICentre - a UNSW research centre located at the Art & Design campus. Videos filmed and edited by Paper Moose, and podcast editing and music composition by Bryce Hallid
#thistalk #UNSW #smartgrid
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[@maestro_oz]

Play this on 1.25 speed for normal pace of speech

[@CesarAngeles28]

[@drizlerone]

Not all hero's wear capes ❤

[@CesarAngeles28]

Thanks very much for this! I can only see opinions of people without enough technical background complaining about the progress in renewable energy deployment and just the fact that you expressed it in an easy, understandable way gives me hope that one day the people with enough background will start getting more attention in the matter 😍

[@andrewgrubb9268]

I suggest that we've been let down by so many experts who, if you believe this presentation, have been foolishly adding problematic energy sources to a once reliable grid. Duuuhh couldn't see adding DC power and /or power operating at a different frequency was going to be a problem. But it's OK - just needs more scarce taxpayers $$s when we have many conflicting needs. Vandalism of the economy of the once Lucky Country.

[@mymadrugada]

Brilliant, easy to understand presentation on the electricity system and renewables, thank you!

[@RobBank1985]

Now let’s discuss the costs of the grid infrastructure to support this. Versus let say adding nuclear too.

[@hoobs4271]

Loved the presentation. Helped better understand the issue from its base.✌️

[@xavieraash]

But what exactly is the issue with the inverters? You can look up videos of hydro plants coming online and the sync process - it gets up to speed, then runs slightly slow/fast until lined up, and when it's synced it locks on. Not exactly cutting edge tech. What is it about renewables that challenges this?

[@CesarAngeles28]

oh mate, as he says you would probably need 4 years of a bachelors and couple of a masters degree to understand the level of maths required. Just trust the experts

[@rickthelian2215]

Would batteries at home be a source of stability.

[@xavieraash]

Yes! But mostly for the home owner. To sufficiently affect the grid would require a high number of people both willing to install home batteries (ie enough to have the capacity to "smooth" whole sections of the grid) and to allow it to feed out when required.

[@whoguy4231]

Instead of taking household solar offline, why not divert excess power to pumped hydro, batteries or the new gravity battery like Energy Vault. Investment in energy storage is the way forward rather than cutting renewable energy. A federal incentive should be made so that EVERY grid connected home has a battery to create a distributed energy storage system with redundancy built right in.

[@xavieraash]

Because as stated, the issue here lies with inverters. To get the power to the storage facilities, it would need to travel by the grid, or we would need to build a new grid on dc (which could be done to connect large projects, but is not realistic for every home). To put it on that grid to be stored, you need the inverter, which is to problem in the first place.