Creating a Renewable Energy Export Industry for Australia

ANU Kioloa Coastal campus

Greetings from the Australian National University Kioloa Coastal Campus (KCC). I attending a retreat for the Zero-Carbon Energy for the Asia-Pacific (ZCEAP) Grand Challenge  Team. The team is researching how to set up a renewable energy export industry for Australia, in 25 years time, which is comparable in size to coal and gas today.

Energy could be collected in north western Australia by large wind or solar farms, then exported to Asia, via undersea cable, by ship as liquefied gas, or refined metals.

There are researchers from many disciplines, working questions such as markets, geopolitical issues, development for Indigenous communities, value-added manufacturing in the Pilbara.

I am one of the "cloud" participants on the periphery of the project, interested in how ICT can help, and how online education of the research outputs can be created (I teach ICT Sustainability). One issue is how to freely work with academics, while protecting valuable intellectual property, especially from hacking attack.

There was a pitch session at the retreat,  where ideas of what we could do were put up. I had not asked to speak at this but realized my work on online education was relevant. One of the issues with introduction of renewable energy is that many people have to learn new skills. This ranges from some one installing and maintaining solar panels, up to industry executives and government policy makers.

The traditional way to provide training and education is with classroom courses. However, that requires taking people away from their workplace for days or weeks. In the case of renewable energy for the Asia-pacific, the training center could be thousands of km from the trainee. Another issue is that the training is not perceived as of value to the individual or their organisation.

Instead of classroom courses, training can now be delivered in the workplace, online, via a mobile phone. This training can meet industry and national quality standards, and provide credit to further vocational, or university study. It happened I talked about this at EduTECH 2019 in Sydney last week, so pined my presentation up on the pitch board. This attracted some interest from colleagues.

What looked most relevant was the issue of training for remote indigenous communities in Australia and islands of the Pacific. While a multi-billion dollar energy project with thousands of workers on one site can schedule training, this is much more difficult with thousands of personnel scattered over about one quarter of the world.

In his PHD thesis, Philip Townsend (p. 26, 2017), pointed out there has been rapid adoption of mobile devices in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. He looked at how to use these devices for the education of pre-service teachers.

ps: The ANU Kioloa Coastal Campus can accommodate up to 90 people, in cottages and dormitories. As well as a lab, there is a new conference center, with my favorite layout of rectangular rooms, plus tables on wheels. 

Reference

Townsend, Philip, 2017 Travelling together and sitting alongside: How might the use of mobile devices enhance the professional learning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander pre-service teachers in remote communities?, Flinders University, School of Education.  URL https://flex.flinders.edu.au/items/7a690838-1ce2-4a3e-bc1c-510289161e3c/1/?.vi=file&attachment.uuid=eaeb3a0a-8ce3-4dd8-bb3d-33c99a3fa5ef

Network Software to Optimize Household Solar Power

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Dr Lachlan Blackhall (Australia's answer to Elon Musk) launched the Network Aware Coordination (NAC) Platform.  This software has been successfully tested on  Bruny Island, off Tasmania, to optimize the use of household solar panels and batteries. This is the type of technology my students are studying in "ICT Sustainability" (Comp7310).

Powering our electricity grid with energy storage

Dr Lachlan Blackhall, will present "A vision for powering our electricity grid with energy storage" at the Australian National University, 12.30pm, 15 March 2018.

Dr Blackhall is co-founder of Reposit Power and, I suggest, Australia's answer to Elon Musk. He has worked on areas as diverse as e-learning tools (2011) and an ion drive for spacecraft (2007).

References

Blackhall, L. (2011). Educational content authoring tools. A report for written for the College of Engineering and Computer Science, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, 3, 3. 

Blackhall, L., & Khachan, J. (2007). A simple electric thruster based on ion charge exchange. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 40(8), 2491.

Beyond Grid Parity for Solar Power

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where William ("Bill") Tumas from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory is speaking on "Solar Energy R&D and Materials by Design". Dr. Tumas argued that further advances in photo-voltaic (solar) energy were possible to go beyond grid parity, that is not just make solar power as cheap as coal generated electricity, but make it much cheaper. He used the analogy of the development of the automobile: early cars were used as replacement for horse drawn carriages, but the performance of cars did not end with "horse parity".

Dr. Tumas also pointed out that much of the cost of PV power is now not the cost of the PV material, but mounting and installation of the panels. The PV modules cost less than half of the total cost, with the Balance of system (BOS) cost being about 60%. It seems to me that much of the cost is not in manufacturing or installing the panels, but in selling them. If homeowners could simply tick a box when building a house, or buying a unit off the plan and have PV installed, that would considerably reduce the cost. A pre-fabricated PV array could then be delivered to the building site already configured as a roofing panel, positioned on the building and plugged into a pre-installed socket. As well as reducing the cost of surveying the roof for suitability of panel installation, this would eliminate the cost of a separate roofing panel.

There are proprietary panels for installation in roofs, such as the Solatile roof integrated solar panel. However, these still require installation in a roof installed frame. An alternative would be to have standard glass panels installed in a framework in the factory in units small enough for truck transport.

This could be made easier for retrofitting if the necessary wiring was installed in all houses during construction, just as Canberra houses are required to be built with plumbing needed for rainwater reuse.

Beyond Grid Parity for Solar Power

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where William ("Bill") Tumas from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory is speaking on "Solar Energy R&D and Materials by Design". Dr. Tumas argued that further advances in photo-voltaic (solar) energy were possible to go beyond grid parity, that is not just make solar power as cheap as coal generated electricity, but make it much cheaper. He used the analogy of the development of the automobile: early cars were used as replacement for horse drawn carriages, but the performance of cars did not end with "horse parity". Dr. Tumas also pointed out that much of the cost of PV power is now not the cost of the PV material, but installation of the panels.

Online education in solar cell manufacturing

Greetings from the Australian national University in Canberra, where Keith McIntosh, from company PV Lighthouse, is speaking on "PV Factory: Online education and research in solar cell manufacturing". He demonstrated  "PV Factory", an on-line application used at UNSW which students can use to design solar cells and see how they would perform, using a "Virtual Production Line" (VPL).

UNSW and QESST (at Arizona State University) and PV Lighthouse are working to make the UNSW Virtual Production Line generally available:

The project wil create a software platform called the Virtual Production Environment (VPE). The VPE will be a free online resource for the PV industry that will facilitate education and R&D by allowing users to (i) simulate the steps of a solar cell production line, (ii) access libraries of PV information, (iii) contribute to an integrated model of solar cell manufacturing, and (iv) evaluate innovation in terms of manufacturing cost. It will initially incorporate UNSW's Virtual Production Line for screen-printed crystalline silicon solar cells, used for several years in the UNSW undergraduate and postgraduate courses, SOLA3020, PV Technology & Manufacturing and SOLA9006, Solar Cell Technology and Manufacturing.

Interestingly Keith said that their server software generates text which is sent to the student's web browser and turned into graphics using Javascript. Also he showed some statistics as to how often the students access the system during their course, which shows, not surprisingly, that use increases just before assignments are due.

Keith is now working on how to have new research in solar cell making integrated into software which can be quickly made available to students and the industry. I suggest this could significantly reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of solar cells. This is very important to combating global warming and making energy available to developing nations. This could also be applied beyond the PV industry, to computer chip fabrication.

US Energy Expert Awarded Honorary Doctorate by ANU

Greetings from the Great Hall of the Australian National University in Canberra, where Dr. Steven Chu, Professor of Physics and Molecular & Cellular Physiology and former U.S. Secretary of Energy was just awarded an honorary Doctorate for "Science in the Service of Society". Dr. Chu was the first energy secretary who was a scientist and was charged with increasing renewable energy use. Last week he addressed the Light, Energy and the Environment Congress and I was impressed with the way he combined knowledge of the science and politics of climate change. ANU's conferring of this award could be seen as a subtle criticism of the Australian Government's "direct action" climate change policy, as he oversaw a very different policy as part of the US Obama administration. Dr. Chu is also be speaking at the ANU ECI Energy Update, tomorrow, 9 December 2014.