Q - What is your feeling about government policy, particularly in Australia? We’ve got states making some in-roads … the federal government is .... Australia doesn’t have a renewal energy policy like Sweden for example, has policies in place for uptake of batteries…
A – Yeh the policy is another realm in which I personally think that Australia is well behind the policy in some other places mentioned in your question. To borrow a phrase I think originally goes to Ghandi; “What do you think of Australia’s renewal energy policy?”, and the answer is “I think it would be a lovely idea” – the same thing he said about world peace…. I see the tipping point.
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My view is that the consumers are getting interested precisely because government is not…I spend a lot of time in Canberra trying to education politicians…Take electric cars… Australia is the only country with no policy. Businesses and consumers will drive this.
Q – Have you sold any batteries to Telstra?
A – Can’t answer – commercially sensitive. We sell to integrators….eg NZ Emerson did not want us to mention the telco…. We’ve got passed trials and we are selling batteries (not enormous numbers).
Q – Total employers?
A – Including contractors, roughly less than 60 globally.
Q – At the end of the life of the battery, what is the environmental impact/chance of recycling?
A – No official recycling policy… but potential there. Can reuse the Zinc Bromide solution…we believe we can clean and return a new battery…we have tested fluid reused. Plastic can be recycled. Electronics – small bits can be recycled.
Q – Refurbishment at end of life?
A – The battery is the sum of components: Electronics – replace if fails. Potential future point for continuous refurbishments. No barrier in principle, no conceptual barrier. Could have PPA for cells (Price per …) ie financing $/month (rather than buying the battery up-front/outright)
Q – What are our total salesforce?
A – 5. We are selling to retailers so we don’t need lots of sales people. We can succeed with a half dozen large scale integrators.
Q – Do you have hedging against currency fluctuations?
A – Manufacture in USD and we do a bit of hedging. Pretty stable and not too concerned. Telco market operates mostly in USD.
Q – Can Flex ramp up once quality assured?
A – 6-8 months to ramp up in an organised way.
Q – When will you standardize the battery for the LSB option?
A – only one commercial customer – me. We are re-examining the design and it is part of our review. It will be for our integrators in other countries to manufacture the LSBs – we focus on the ZBM2 batteries.
Q – Can you put your system specs up so we can see it?
A – Great idea, I’ll post a blog at
www.simonhackett.com and arrange live view of my energy system dashboard. (View here
https://vrm.victronenergy.com/site/share/a2040765?mainTabId=live-feed )
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