Smart grid

Speaker abstracts and biographies

Chair: Ian Porter, Chief Executive Officer, Alternative Technology Association
Ian Porter is the Chief Executive Officer of the Alternative Technology Association, Australia’s leading not-for-profit organisation promoting sustainable technology and practice for households. The ATA has over 5000 members who are actively walking the talk in their own homes by using good building design, conserving water and using renewable energy. ATA advocates in government and industry arenas for easy access to these technologies as well as continual improvement of the technology, information and products needed to change the way we live.

Prior to joining the ATA, Ian spent eighteen years in the Victorian Government working on sustainable energy policy and climate change. From 2004 to 2007 Ian was the Executive Director in charge of climate change and was responsible for landmark policy documents such as the Victorian Greenhouse Strategy (2002) and the Greenhouse Challenge for Energy (2004).

From 2007 to 2009, Ian led the climate change practice of the Nous Group, working with public and private sector organisations to develop policy and respond to major challenges in the fields of climate change and energy.

Ian is recognised as a leading thinker and policy maker in the climate change and environmental policy arena, resulting from his extensive engagement and involvement within and external to Government. Ian is a Board Member of GreenFleet and a member of the Foundation Group of Safe Climate Australia.

Completing a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Chemistry in 1984, Ian undertook research towards a PhD in theoretical chemistry between 1985 and 1989.
 

Realising the benefits of distributed energy
This presentation outlines a high level view on the value of distributed energy (collectively distributed generation, energy efficiency and demand management) and explores some of the critical decisions and challenges facing energy market stakeholders as it evolves to meet the needs of a low carbon economy, including implications for technology development, business model innovation, policy and regulation.

The presentation is based on a recently completed 600 page report into the value of distributed energy that makes use of economics, engineering and social science disciplines. The report includes economic modelling of future scenarios including Garnaut 450ppm, complete analysis of policy and regulatory barriers to distributed energy, case studies, surveys and focus groups with energy market stakeholders, including customers, to uncover insights into their energy needs.

See http://www.csiro.au/resources/IG-report.html for full details.

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Anthony Szatow, Project Leader, Intelligent Grid, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
Anthony leads the Intelligent Grid project at CSIRO, a multidisciplinary project designed to better understand the value of distributed energy and provide insights into how it can be realised. He has been lead author and co-author on a range of papers concerning distributed energy that look at case studies, barriers and enablers of distributed energy, energy market stakeholder perceptions of distributed energy including policy and regulatory frameworks. Prior to his role at CSIRO, Anthony has worked as a project consultant and advocate in the energy domain.

Anthony has spoken at a variety of conferences including the sustainable living festival, Bendigo renewable energy conference, iGrid forums and has conducted many private workshops and presentations with industry and Government stakeholders. His current interests are across consumer decisions making, institutional decision making and organisational change.

Smart grid and decarbonising power generation
The idea of smart grid is currently receiving much attention. However, there are differences in understanding of concept of smart grid and in how this concept should be implemented. Moreover, there is no clear agreement, worldwide, on what a power grid must include in order to be considered as smart grid.

The fact is that with a growing demand for reliable and sustainable power supply, there is a need for modern and smarter grid applying new technologies and tools to work more efficiently, more reliable with affordable maintenance, with ability to accommodate more renewable energy sources, to reduce consumers carbon footprint and etc.

The main objective of this talk is to review the characteristics and associated weaknesses of traditional electric power network and to highlight the opportunities and challenges that smart grid technologies can provide to make grid capable of working far more efficiently.

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Prof Ahmad Zahedi, Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering, James Cook University, Queensland
Ahmad Zahedi (PhD) is an Associate Professor and Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering with the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences of James Cook University, Queensland, Australia. He has educated in Iran and Germany and is author or co-author of more than 150 publications including 4 books, has trained 16 postgraduate candidates at Master and PhD levels, and has completed 15 research and industry-funded projects. He has 20 years tertiary teaching and research and 6 years industry experience.

Home Energy Management
With the large scale roll-out of Smart Meters having commenced in Victoria in 2009, there is now significant industry and community focus on delivering on the consumer benefits of Home Energy Management (HEM) that emerge from the availability of real-time energy consumption data through the Smart Meter’s Zigbee interface.

HEM benefits are both compelling and wide-ranging - from reducing consumer carbon footprint to the management of distributed renewable energy and electric vehicles. Consumers also stand to benefit from pricing incentives when participating in peak demand management scenarios as well as creating and adopting energy usage profiles that suit their lifestyles.

HEM solutions also enable utilities to better manage their investment in infrastructure for peak load demand and also create new opportunities to strengthen customer relationships, and realise new revenue from value-added services.

This presentation will discuss Cisco’s vision, architecture and product strategy for enabling the evolution of Home Energy Management to deliver the benefits discussed above. The presentation will include case studies of overseas trials and will review benefits and challenges experienced in those trials.

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Rada Stanic, Consulting Solutions Architect - Utilities, Cisco Australia
Rada Stanic is the Consulting Solutions Architect lead within Cisco Australia on all aspects of the end to end Smart Grid Architecture for Utilities. As a member of Smart Grid Australia with active participation in the Intelligent Network working group, Rada has contributed to several white papers on the topics of Home Area Network, Smart Grid Security and National Broadband Network Smart Grid requirements. Additionally, for the last ten years Rada has been responsible for design and architecture of large carrier grade networks specialising in MPLS, Metro Ethernet, Broadband and VoIP technologies. Prior to joining Cisco, she was a Senior Software Engineer at Alcatel-Lucent. Rada holds a Bachelor Degree in Telecommunications and Electronics Engineering and lives with her family in Sydney.
 

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