Inaugural Queensland Energy Storage Summit

The Inaugural Queensland Energy Storage Summit was held in mid February of this year conducted by the Australian Energy Storage Council with the support of the Queensland Government opened by The Hon Mark Bailey, MP, Minister for Main Roads, Road safety and Ports and Minister for Energy, Biofuels and Water Supply.

It was an extreemly productive and useful day discussing energy storage research and development, innovation, key industry projects and barriers to adoption for energy storage from the customer, network operator and technology provider’s perspective.

I thought I would share some of the key take outs from the day from my perspective as an interested participant and observer;

• There appears to be a disconnect between network tariffs, incentives and the customers interests with regard to adopting energy storage;
• Customers are keen to see network operators change their remuneration model to incentivise them to adopt energy storage;
• Any energy storage offering  must provide clear customer value;
• Customers are looking for integrated solutions across energy generation, storage, management and the overall cost of energy supply;
• Customers want a central point of contact, and single solution provider, ideally independent of the networks and/or traditional energy retailers;
• Communication, and security of data transfer, with the network appear to remain the number one issue for integration;
• Industry needs a common communications protocol and installation standards (e.g. draft AS/NZS 4755.3.5 Compliant Inverters);
• Industry needs to develop a database of installs as there is currently no centralised information repository;
• Major investment in energy infrastructure will continue in Australia however the split of expenditure may change from network initiated to more customer initiated through individual/collective storage and micro-grids;
• Network control of ~30% of customer systems may provide incentive for network involvement and support of distributed energy systems.

I would be really interested in your comments on the above and experiences in the rapidly developing Energy Storage industry.

Please feel free to comment or shoot me a note direct at freflo@bigpond.com anytime.

Peter Bates is an experienced senior manager providing consultancy and development services to a wide range of global and start-up companies. Peter's expertise includes market analysis, developing and implementing market entry strategies, identifying and communicating competitive advantage, business development and translating technical concepts into language ‘the rest of us’ can understand. Please contact Peter directly, via LinkedIn, or at freflo@bigpond.com if you could use some help in capturing the opportunities out there for your business.