South Australia's Renewable Future By Jack Baldwin / 23rd of...

South Australia's Renewable Future
By Jack Baldwin / 23rd of October, 2014

Battery Tech
ZEN Energy are best known for their Freedom Powerbank battery system, which almost doubled the effectiveness of batteries through software alone. They've receivedsignificant funding to further develop their software and technology.
CEO Richard Turner believes that home energy storage will change the way we live.

"There is going to be a radical change. It's like moving from mainframe computing to PCs all over again - we're going from centralised energy generation and the grid to distributed energy generation and storage, where we generate and store and consume power where we need it," he says.

He's seen evidence that power utilities are strongly looking in to their own battery solutions and how to integrate more distributed energy production in the grid.

"It's a bit of a conundrum for them. We're part of their problem, but we're also part of the solution for them, in terms of cheaper augmentation of the power grid. Storage is a very good way of balancing and optimising because we can store power in low demand, pull it back in high demand, and actually flatten that demand curve."

ZEN sees three markets: the consumer market for people who want to go off grid, or become grid-independent, the retailer market for companies like AGL and Origin, who will be selling less power in the future as people become more self-sufficient - but will pick up the slack by selling more hardware such as solar and storage systems, and the utility market, as a partner to optimise the grid.

They're not the only company at it: Tindo recently announced a collaboration with the University of South Australia to develop metal-air batteries which have the potential to increase capacity significantly.

Old graphite mines on South Australia's mineral-rich Eyre Peninsula are reopening, taking up the slack to provide resources to massive enterprises like Elon Musk's giga-factory making the next generation of batteries for electric vehicles.

South Australian mining companies such as Lincoln Minerals, Archer Exploration and Valence Industries have claims on huge deposits of some of the world's highest quality flake graphite.

"This is a commodity breakthrough starting to have tsunami-like demand dynamics," said Lincoln Minerals Managing Director Dr John Parker, about the rise of the electric car and demand for lithium-ion batteries, of which graphite is a crucial component.

Valence Industries are also investing heavily in graphite and graphene - whether it's research or processing facilities - with a view to pursue high value markets such as battery-grade graphite.

If large scale enterprises like the Nevada giga-factory succeed in pushing battery prices down for the electric car market, then technologies that South Australia already excels in, such as solar PV, will benefit from low storage costs and put further pressure on generators.

http://theleadsouthaustralia.com.au/innovators/south-australias-renewable-future/