You might not have heard of it, or you might choose to stay away from the frenzy, the annual All Energy conference was held in the last week of October, hosting tens of thousand participants over two days for up to a dozen concurrent sessions and a few hundred solar, battery, EV and EV charging, and grid stalls.
So it’s big – and importantly sets a tone for significant trends from markets and policy. So here are some highlights
- C&I (commercial & industrial) solar and batteries - now that the STC scheme that has been so important supporting household solar over decades has been widen to be more accommodating to C&I, all the major suppliers where at All Energy to show off their C&I scale solutions.
- Electrification of transport is mainstream - all the things we used to dream about have moved from "if" to "when" and "how": vehicle to home/grid; truck segments, truck charging, even a light commercial truck on display; EV charging infrastructure roll out, on the road and in homes, apartments and businesses.
- Efficiency is back in a big way, looking at business and the ways batteries, thermal batteries and efficiency can combine to reduce business energy use and so reduce business costs.
- Digitisation - it may seem esoteric, but think about it, everything you know of as "the grid", the infamous "poles and wires", is a hero of the Twentieth Century, a driver of economic revolutions, but that also means it is mostly century old technology - nothing like the internet. But solid state power electronics are turning that on its head. We already have inverters, now millions of them in peoples homes. Now add "grid forming" inverters that can maintain the grid engineering characteristic in much the same way all the old big spinning machines do. Coming down the line are solid state transformers.
That’s far from comprehensive, just the impressions of one correspondent of a lively industry event!