Tesla battery a game-changer, but networks still in the game

It was a point of note – and some amusement – at this week’s Energy Networks Association conference in Sydney that virtually every presentation featured a slide of Tesla’s Elon Musk, standing in front of his newly launched Powerwall energy storage system, looking triumphant.

Tesla’s Elon Musk during the unveiling of the company’s “Powerwall’ at an event in California on April 30                 Image:. Tim Rue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“It is here! The energy revolution has started,” declared Accenture’s Ann Burns. “Elon Musk has delivered the $3,500 Powerwall … and has busted all the myths.”

Indeed, the general feeling at the aptly named Energy Transformed conference was that Tesla’s great battery reveal late last week had changed the tone of the energy conversation, even as far away as the Australian Maritime Museum, where the ENA seminar was held on Thursday.

According to Luke Osborne, chief operating officer of Canberra-based Reposit Power, which will be offering Tesla’s battery technology as part of a series of solar plus storage trials across the NEM, his customers aren’t even bothering to ask about the rate of return on the Powerwall, “they are just buying the things, whether we like it or not.”

So it is a Big Deal. But as far as Osborne and his team are concerned, the idea that the coming of affordable household energy storage will also usher in a utility death spiral is, well, “bollocks.”

According to Osborne, who spoke at the ENA conference on Thursday, the new electricity consumer – the old one is “gone, dead, never coming back,” says Burns – wants to buy and sell electricity.

Today’s energy “prosumer” wants to buy when prices are low, wants to self consume when prices are moderate, and wants to sell energy to the grid when prices are high.

It’s the economics of trade, says Osborne, and it means that networks are not going anywhere.

“I firmly see networks as central to this shift,” Osborne told the conference. “It’s a wonderful opportunity.

“It would be crazy, traumatic, for people to go off-grid,” he adds. “They’ll be running diesel generation all day if they try it.

“I reckon networks should be going gang busters on letting people trade energy,” Osborne said. “Let the market do its thing.”

“They definitely don’t want you dictating hardware choices,” he said, but “people would love it if you bought services from them.

“Have a platform that can link any kind of storage. …They can provide valuable data for you. And in return, you can provide the consumer with cost-effective reliability.”

According to Accenture’s Ann Burns, Reposit’s business model, which does just that, is one of many pivotal, disruptive, “trouble-making” companies, that are driving an energy revolution that revolves around the concept of autonomous supply.

Others she mentions in her speech at the Sydney conference are Alevo, an EU and US-based energy service provider whose focus is on time-shift energy, storing and delivering electricity when and where it is needed; New York City utility ConEdison, which is staging its own energy revolution in Brooklyn; and Vandebron, a Dutch start-up that enables people to buy their power directly from a sustainable producer – such as farmers who host wind turbines, or who make energy out of pig poo.

Like Osborne, Burns believes that the new major role of energy companies like these will be to engage with customers and help them to supply energy back to the grid, and to get the most out of the “bright, shiny new” energy management devices they are buying up with gusto.

Phil Blythe – the founding managing director of leading Australian energy demand management company, GreenSync, agrees.

“Utilities should be leaders in distributed energy services,” he told the ENA conference. “But they should allow customers to play a role in the stabilisation of the grid.”

“Batteries are not a service, people need guidance to connect the right product, use them at the right times and get more control over grid costs.

“For the utilities, the money now comes from efficiencies in the grid.”

But what will drive people away, Blythe adds, “is a reluctance from utilities to accept that people want to control their own infrastructure and consumption.”