As the ‘final warning’ from the world’s leading scientists has noted, what we do about the climate crisis in the next decade will determine the future of the human race for millennia.
And while the world barrelled towards irreversible disaster without swift and drastic action, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) extended technological innovation as a way to cut global heating and mitigate its worst effects.
“Finance, technology and international cooperation are critical enablers for accelerated climate action,” IPCC noted in its March 2023 report. “Enhancing technology innovation systems is key to accelerate the widespread adoption of technologies and practices.”
Deploying clean energy technology such as solar, wind and energy storage were critical enablers of a ‘Net Zero’ future free of the most harmful effects of greenhouse gas emissions, said the IPCC.
Parijat Roychowdhury envisions a world run on clean and smart technology. As national smart engineering, analytics and AI solution lead at Akkodis Australia, Roychowdhury said reengineering the grid for smarter and more responsive performance was critical to keeping the rise in global heating this century below 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels.
And although the grid’s engineering was largely unchanged for a century, recent technological improvements could spark radical emissions cuts and spur on renewables, he said.
“There is a huge opportunity of introducing digitally connected smart engineering solutions, and revolutionise the field of energy generation, transportation and, ultimately, consumption and monitoring,” Roychowdhury said.
“Energy production, management, storage and distribution will play a pivotal role in achieving Net Zero. Akkodis globally plays a role across many parts of the energy value chain, including cutting-edge developments in the emerging fields of hydrogen and batteries, both of which have great potential in Australia.”
Renewable technologies such as solar, wind, pumped-hydro and even hydrogen were of increasing importance to a sustainable mix but the energy sector must build smarter systems to exploit them to their fullest. Because, while wind and solar were intermittent sources, consumers expected electricity at the flick of a switch.
“One of the biggest issues is energy reliability, or dispatch guarantee of energy, so energy companies need the right aggregation systems in place,” he said.
Meanwhile, Australians were more conscious as we fed electricity back into the grid from our own solar arrays: “They know their energy footprint — how their energy is generated and how they’re consuming”.
How Akkodis engineered a smarter electricity grid to cut blackout risk
The result was Australia’s 3.4 million homes and businesses may generate up to 20 gigawatts of electricity, which challenged electricity companies matching supply with demand to avoid overpaying while averting blackouts.
Although it accounted for 16 per cent of Australia’s electricity production, solar’s intermittency challenged classic grid economics. As the sun rose on cloudless days, ramping up rooftop production, wholesale electricity prices tumbled. The Australian Energy Regulator said that for the first time, average weekly Victorian prices were negative for a week in December 2022 while the National Energy Market experienced a record number of negative prices, “driven by good solar generating conditions and very low demand” — three quarters of which were in Victoria and SA.
Akkodis piloted with a WA electricity company and some of their retail customers that are big solar producers to better manage both sides of the ledger. It stood up a Distributed Resource Management System (DERMS) system based on Microsoft Azure cloud technology while leveraging machine learning to predict supply and demand up to a year in advance. It did so by drawing on historical data such as weather and power consumption, wholesale price and so on. It communicated through an application programming interface over the internet to an IoT edge device (‘droplet’) attached to the customer’s inverter, telling it to stop feeding into the grid just before negative pricing events would occur.
“It’s ensuring there is no high influx of energy into the grid, which might disrupt the infrastructure and result in widespread load-shedding [leading] to blackouts,” Roychowdhury said.
Bridging tech skills gap critical to exploit clean energy gold rush
While such pilots may encourage future innovation, they revealed why Australia needed more technology skills to mitigate climate change.
“There is a massive skill gap — which we are already feeling — but it's going to get more intense. And government and industry need a plan to fill that gap and address emerging opportunities in the transition to renewables, hydrogen, batteries and so on.”
Roychowdhury noted that, through the global reach of its Akkodis Academy, the digital engineering skills provider is already speeding thousands of professionals into industry to address the looming clean energy skills crunch.
Far from a doom and gloom scenario, the rise of technologies to meet Net Zero commitments will spur innovation, industrial capacity and economic windfalls for those who seize the opportunities.
“Renewables is the next gold rush, and people and governments need to see its potential and invest. And industry needs to be brave and willing to change themselves.”
Just to survive, human society needs an energy and technology revolution — and it needs it fast.
“When the world moved from candle light to the light bulb, it was not done progressively; it was a revolution. The same will happen with energy transformation,” Roychowdhury said.
“We cannot incrementally improve on what we are doing with fossil fuel and carbon-emitting technologies; we have to revolutionise by introducing the right mix of renewable technology and change the whole system to a more stable, clean and green solution.”
Visit Akkodis Australia to learn how the global digital engineering powerhouse can speed your energy and clean technology transformation.
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