Smart grid, smart building solutions named as tech comp finalists

The finalists for the 2015 Australian Technologies Competition have been announced, showcasing innovations that include energy monitoring and control, peak energy load predicting software and grid balancing technology for network operators.

The competition, now in its fifth year, announced the 16 finalists on Monday – whittled down from an original total of 128 competition entrants – in six categories, including energy, manufacturing, food & agritech, mining, smart buildings and global development.

The finalists named in the energy sector include GreenSync, Metro Power Company and Switch Automation.

According to ATC, Switch Automation – which has also been nominated in the Built Environment category – has developed the world’s first completely cloud-hosted operations platform for managing buildings and other physical assets, aimed at revolutionising the way buildings are managed.

Metro Power, meanwhile, has invented a smart grid analytics platform named ‘E2M’ that acts as a decision support system for large grid network operations control centres by predicting future rolling 15 minute peak electricity loads across their grid, 96 hours ahead of time.

Former competition winners, nominated for this year’s Alumni Award, included RayGen Resources and Enlighten Australia.

RayGen, which won the ATC energy award in 2014 for its unique concentrating solar PV technology, recently inked a deal that could see it install a minimum of 500MW of its CSPV in China, worth around $1bn in sales.

ACT Organiser John O’Brien says the competition’s mission is to turn great technologies into great businesses.

“We aim to find the best companies, provide them with the best mentoring possible and connect them with global partners, including on our trip to Hong Kong in December. We want to help create multi-billion dollar global success stories.”

The finalists will pitch to judges at the ATC15 Showcase on October 20, and the Australian Winner will be announced at an Awards event that evening.

The finalists are also automatically nominated into the GCCA Late Stage Cleantech Awards to increase their global exposure and profile of cleantech innovation in Australia.

Australia’s cleantech sector has been a relatively strong performer of late, with the CleanTech Index ahead of both ASX benchmarks with a 10 per cent gain recorded over the last 12 months, compared to the 7.4 per cent loss for the ASX200.

According to the latest update from Australian CleanTech, the market capitalisation of the 63 stocks in the Australian CleanTech Index is $A17.1 billion, down from March’s record of $18.9 billion but a long way up from its low of $A6.2 billion in July 2012.

Five companies recorded gains of more than 15 per cent and fourteen companies recorded losses of more than 15 per cent, the report said.