The Australian National University (ANU) opened a new laboratory on Tuesday (13 July) to help build a greener and more climate-change-resilient electricity grid.
Vice-Chancellor of the ANU, Brian Schmidt said the Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Lab would research and test new technologies, like batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles, that were expected to underpin the energy grids of the future.
“As Australia moves away from large, centralised fossil-fuel powered generators to a decentralised grid consisting of a vast array of distributed renewable energy assets, we need to find innovative ways to enable this vast amount of renewable energy to safely and effectively enter the electricity grid,” Professor Schmidt said.
“It is through the research carried out in the Distributed Energy Resources Lab that we, as a society, will be equipped with the technology and capabilities that will help smooth out and accelerate this vital energy transition,” he said.
“The Lab will provide a fail-safe power system to rapidly, efficiently and securely develop and test technologies and systems before deploying them into the live grid.”
Professor Schmidt thanked the Territory for its support of the Lab through a $1.5 million Priority Investment Program grant in 2019.
Chief Operating Officer of the ANU’s Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program, Heather Logie said that over the past two years, the DER Lab team had embarked on an ambitious program of work.
“Over the last few years, the world has moved from simply de-carbonising the electricity sector to de-carbonising the whole economy,” Ms Logie said.
“We are now in a race to ‘electrify everything’ and this means we need to build an energy ecosystem that is powered by millions of connected and different devices, including batteries, vehicles and even air conditioners,” she said.
Ms Logie said the plug-and-play set up of the Lab gave researchers, Government and industry the opportunity to test new technology and how it could be harnessed by Australia’s energy grid.
