Thinking Energy
At Gridcognition, we’re always thinking energy – musings, ponderings, predictions – we can’t get enough of it. Stay up to date and follow our journey as we work to build the software that enables the future of energy around the world.
Solar Export Tariffs in GB
Introduction Our previous post compared the value that residential PV solar owners in Australia can get from the various Feed in Tariff (FiT) schemes in different states. We found that the relative economics of wholesale market prices and FiT schemes varied...
Solar Feed in Tariffs in Australia: Who’s Getting a Raw Deal?
Introduction In recent years solar feed-in-tariffs (FiTs) in Australia have been falling steadily to reflect both changes to the underlying wholesale markets, but also in acknowledgement by governments that solar no longer needs juicy FiT incentives to fly....
Modelling community batteries
Here's a quick video building on our recent blog post on community battery network tariffs. I've taken one of the trial tariffs and added in the perspective of how the battery might reduce network cost at the local distribution level.
Wind modelling, made simple
The new energy system will be made up of lots of variable renewable energy generation from wind and solar, balanced with energy storage and demand flexibility. Gridcognition enables all of these resources to be integrated together for everything from utility-scale...
Network pricing signals for community batteries. Which network offers the best tariff?
Overview This post was edited on 9 September 2022 to correct the results for the Evoenergy Residential Area tariff The energy system is in transition. We’re shifting away from a small number of large centrally located and primarily thermal (fossil-fuel powered)...
Comparing Contingency Frequency Control Markets in Australia and the UK
In a recent blog post, we compared the financial case for installing solar (and optionally battery storage) to a supermarket in Australia versus the UK. That analysis only considered using the solar generation and battery storage to reduce spend on energy imported...
Meet Gridcognition’s new Senior Data Scientist, Joe Wyndham.
Gridcognition recently hired a new Senior Data Scientist. Joe Wyndham has joined us from University of Technology in Sydney where he is currently completing his PhD in Sustainable Futures (Digital Grid Transformation). At Gridcognition, he has been busy working on our...
Is London a better investment for solar than Sydney?
Following my trip to the UK earlier this month I was struck by a couple of things related to solar PV investment. One was the weather; London turned on the sunshine big time. The other was the current trend in the UK energy market to dumb down price signals to energy...
DER Orchestration in the WEM
Western Australia is a global hotspot for high-penetration of distributed generation in the electricity system, and the Government proactively defined a roadmap for DER integration and orchestration in early 2020. In line with the roadmap, Government has recently...
Connecting to MongoDB Atlas in Lambdas with IAM Roles
In this blog post I will walk through how you connect secrurely to MongoDB Atlas with AWS Lambdas through IAM roles. Dilemma of Integrations Integrations are surprisingly hard to do, nothing is more frustrating than spending hours trying to implement something with...
Battery Storage in a NEM with no Spot market
The National Electricity Market (NEM) in Australia is in disarray this week. What does this mean for Battery Storage? The situation started when extreme events in the NEM lead to prices being capped at $300/MWh in all NEM mainland regions on Monday 13 June. This led...
The UN Energy 24/7 Carbon-free Energy Compact
I am pleased to announce that Gridcognition is now officially a signatory of the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact. This UN Energy Compact, is focused on the need accelerate the decarbonization of the world’s electricity systems to mitigate climate change and ensure...
Which UK DNO provides the strongest price signal for EV charging?
Back in late 2020 we had a look at the impact that an electric vehicle (EV) charging investment would have on the network costs for a 24/7 retail business - think fast food restaurant or service station - across the different Australian distribution network providers....
Meet our Flexible Markets Lead, Alex Leemon!
We're thrilled to welcome Flexible Markets Lead Alex Leemon to the Gridcognition leadership team. After a decade working for some of Australia's leading energy sector innovators, Alex has joined Gridcognition to help our product team and customers maximise the market...
Pete Goes Off Grid – Part 2: Adding an EV
A couple of weeks ago I posted some analysis looking at how much battery storage I would need to add to my existing solar system at home to be fully self-sufficient & 100% carbon free with respect to my electricity consumption. The post generated a bit of interest...
AWS Managed Pubsub with Authorization
This is a technical blogpost from our CTO, Sam Thorogood. Amazon provides a managed GraphQL service called AppSync. GraphQL supports queries, mutations and also this nebulous concept called subscriptions—these allow participants to observe other mutations as they...
Energy Guide: Australian Federal Election 2022
The federal election is barrelling towards us, or perhaps not coming fast enough. Regardless, you may be wondering what the parties battling for our votes have planned for Australia’s energy system. Unfortunately for the informed elector and mercifully for the author...
Gridcognition selected for London Tech Week ANZ Trade Mission 2022
Following a competitive application process, Gridcognition has been selected as a delegate for the UK Government's 2022 London Tech Week ANZ Trade Mission and our team couldn't be more excited! London Tech Week is Europe’s largest technology festival and it attracts...
What does seasonal variation mean for the NEM?
Is the NEM a winter or a summer peaking market? Australian summers are hot, so summer, right? Right? Well, it’s not quite so simple. Let’s look at each of the five regions in the NEM, explored in the glorious Neapolitan palette of the Grand Budapest Hotel. 1. These...
I used Gridcognition software to see if my house could go 100% off-grid
There’s much discussion in energy circles around how much storage will be required to deliver the zero-carbon energy systems the world is heading towards. We know we can build out renewable generation cheaply, but we also know we need storage to tide us through the...
Distributed energy disruption has arrived, so what can electricity retailers do to thrive?
The traditional view of the electricity supply chain is something like: Generators → Transmission & Distribution → Retailers → Consumers. Every other participant in the supply chain, including consumers (as 'prosumers'), are involved in the physical creation or...
For the energy transition to succeed, we have to say goodbye to spreadsheets
One of the most notorious chapters in the history of energy was the epic Enron scandal. Enron was arguably an energy innovator, leading the deregulation of energy markets in the US in the 1990s, but their eventual collapse rocked energy markets to the point of...
New Zealand – We’re ready to help accelerate the transition to clean energy
The New Zealand government has an aggressive target "that 90 percent of electricity generation be from renewable sources by 2025”*, which means there’s a clear imperative to deploy infrastructure fast, including DER assets. We’re happy to announce that the...
Former Google tech leader, Sam Thorogood, joins Gridcognition as Chief Technology Officer
Gridcognition welcomes Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Sam Thorogood, to the leadership team. After more than a decade at Google Australia, Sam will manage the engineering team and set the technical direction for Gridcognition’s innovative software platform. CEO...
Five kinds of solar curtailment
Western Australia has recently joined South Australia in implementing a 'Distributed Generation Management' scheme, whereby some roof-top solar systems can be remotely turned off by the electricity system operator. Not surprisingly, that has raised eyebrows in the...
Gridcognition increases funding to almost $4 million as energy industry leaders race towards transition
More funding to help direct the energy transition Pete and Fabian, the co-founders of Gridcognition, are excited to announce we've ramped up our total funding to almost $4 million, after closing our Seed fundraising round recently. It only feels like yesterday that we...
Gridcognition recognized as “game changing” deep tech company at Tech23
I’d almost forgotten how energizing industry events can be, until the recent Tech23 Showcase held in Sydney. It was an in-person event, in a real room, with real tables and real people - how refreshing! With panellists from academia, government and business, the...
Modelling Dynamic Operating Envelopes with Gridcognition
Distribution limits Australia is leading the world on the deployment of distributed generation and South Australia is the poster child for this; we had events last year where almost all of SA's electrical load was met by roof-top solar. But there is a limit to how...
When turning off your solar system can make you money
Nudged along by Anthony Seipolt's post on AGL Australia offering a new retail tariff incentivising residential customers to turn off their solar systems in return for some cash (importantly, more cash than they'd otherwise get from their feed in tariff), here's a very...
A world first? Probably.
Only a few years ago debate was running hot over whether even relatively low levels of renewable energy in the world's electricity grids was achievable, and back then "renewables" typically meant large utility-scale assets. Back then few people would have seen this...
Climate Tech 1000? We’re on the list!
Gridcognition was recently named in the Climate Tech 1000 “a list of the 1000 most promising Climate Tech startups and companies around the world”, and Top 100 in Australia New Zealand. The research project is a joint venture between HolonIQ and Climate Salad, with...
Reasons to be cheerful
So COP26 has kicked off this week in Glasgow. The 2021 version of the Conference of Parties (that’s what COP stands for) likely heralds another round of geopolitical posturing, mudslinging and pledging from our world leaders. The whole point of the COP events is to...
Microgrids and the future of energy supply in Western Australia
Australia has some of the longest distance and lowest density transmission and distribution networks in the world. For the energy users in remote and regional locations on the edge of our power grids, this means unreliable supply and high electricity losses. While...
Have you met: Adam Green
Adam Green, an energy engineer turned data scientist, joined Gridcognition as a Data Engineer in late 2020. Having recently returned to New Zealand after an eight year stint in the UK and Germany, which began with a masters in energy engineering, from the University...
SNRG and Gridcognition accelerating the electrification of UK homes
Australian technology startup Gridcognition has announced a partnership with their first UK-based customer, expanding their modelling and optimisation capabilities to the UK energy market. SNRG will be using the Gridcognition simulation platform to design and optimise...
Have you met: Alice McCullagh
Alice joined the Gridcognition team in March 2021, and it's safe to say she hit the ground running! We thought it would be fun to get to know the team a little better, especially now that we're hiring (hint hint!) and Alice kindly agreed to be my first interview - if...
Gridcognition accelerating international growth with commercialisation grant
Gridcognition has been announced today as one of eight Australian businesses to receive a share of $3.9 million in funding through the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology. Read the full announcement on Business.gov.au here Securing a total of $998k through...
Wholesale Demand Response in the NEM: Eligibility deep dive
TL;DR Jump to the results to see which C&I load shapes will be eligible* to play in the new Wholesale Demand Response market. Upload your site interval data and we’ll run it through the Gridcognition software (for free!) and tell you whether you’re likely to...
Wholesale Demand Response in the NEM: What’s it all about?
For energy market enthusiasts, October 2021 is a date in the calendar worth circling. We’ll see the introduction of two significant rule changes into the National Electricity Market (NEM) on Australia’s east coast. October 1 sees the start of 5-minute settlement...
What makes a good battery energy storage system?
We've talked about the use-cases for battery energy storage systems, but what are the qualities that make one battery energy storage system (BESS) better or worse for a given use-case? We've made another list! If you are making an investment case for battery energy...
Nobody’s Fool: Weaving uncertainty into the fabric of our modelling
Our job at Gridcognition is help our customers plan and optimise distributed energy projects.
The energy environment is changing rapidly, and energy projects have inherent uncertainty from multiple sources.
What are battery energy storage systems for?
We've been told that battery energy storage systems are an essential part of the world's future energy system - but how, exactly? What are the different use-cases for battery systems? We've made a list! If you are making an investment case for battery energy...
What the ESB has planned for Distributed Energy Resources
This week Australia's Energy Security Board released its Post-2025 Market Design Options Paper. The paper proposes pathways and reform options to meet four key areas of need for Australia's future energy system: Resource adequacy through the transition Essential...
Google is targeting 24/7 carbon-free… Should you?
In the recent episode of the Interchange, Smarter Grid Solutions Podcast, host Shayle Kann spoke with Michael Terrell, Google’s Director of Energy about their goal to reach 24/7 Carbon Free Energy by 2030. When 100% isn’t 100% In 2017, Google became the first major...
Understanding the Electricity System – An MVP
The minimum viable product (MVP) is a concept deeply ingrained into startup culture. It's a response to the perfectionism that can slow down learning and innovation cycles, and by building MVPs instead of 'perfect' product, it can help startups understand if what they...
Is my investment hitting its numbers?
It's a question anyone who's deploying capital on DER, so assets like solar PV, battery storage, electric vehicle charging, hydrogen electrolysers etc, will be asking themselves. The fact is that distributed energy resources often exhibit quite dynamic behaviours and...
The Gridcognition Manifesto
Today, countries representing 78% of global GDP have pledged net-zero emissions by 2060. And we hope that this level of commitment will rise significantly before the end of this decade. Energy from fossil fuels accounts for more than 70% of global emissions and, over...
Hackathon project: Gamifing demand management
Shifting the curve - analysing the effects of energy efficiency projects Problem We've been mostly focused on optimising distributed energy assets at Gridcognition, including solar, storage and EV charging. We thought we'd use our Hackathon at last weeks...
Gridcognition Virtual Retreat
It was the one year anniversary of Gridcognition this month and we had our inaugural week-long company-wide retreat. This time it was virtual but we're hoping that our next one will be in-person. Gridcognition mission We started the week talking about our...
Investing in the future of energy with Gridcognition
Aussie energy tech startup Gridcogniton have closed a $675k pre-seed investment round this week with some of Australia’s leading tech and clean energy investors. From a standing start in February 2020, co-founders Fabian Le Gay Brereton and Pete Tickler have assembled...
Maximising battery value: a commercial analysis of front-of-meter vs behind-the-meter storage
There’s a healthy debate underway in the energy sector around where battery energy storage assets should be located within electricity systems, in order to create the greatest possible value, both for their owners and for society more broadly. As a general rule, the...
Custom File Uploads to S3
There are three kinds of geeks at Gridcognition: energy geeks, data science geeks, and software geeks. I’m the third kind and I thought I’d share what I learnt last week when I was building a file uploader for Amazon S3. Making your own file uploader to s3 can be...
Counties Power and Gridcognition launch distributed energy pilot
EnergyLab’s Scaleup Program has delivered its first clean energy collaboration, with New Zealand-based energy utility Counties Power and energy data startup Gridcognition launching a pilot study to understand large scale distributed energy resources (DER)...
Will Victoria’s big battery win big or lose its shirt?
Going toe-to-toe with the US election for media attention, this week saw the announcement of another huge battery storage project for Australia. Imaginatively dubbed the Victorian 'Big Battery', the project, which is to be located near Geelong in Victoria on...
The global push for clean energy
After days of counting, today it has become clear that Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. He has declared that addressing climate change is “the No 1 issue facing humanity” and has promised $2 trillion in climate spending and policies to put...
Which network provides the strongest price signal for EV charging?
The transition to decarbonised and decentralised energy systems is occurring in lockstep with the growth in e-mobility. Whether it's countries ratcheting up emissions standards, outright bans on new sales of internal combustion engine vehicles or the auto...
Optimising the environmental performance of distributed energy assets
For many organisations (like Google with their commitment to 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy) optimising the design and operation of their DER assets...
Which network provides the strongest price signal for solar and batteries?
The TL;DR We simulated the same behind-the-meter commercial solar and battery project across the 14 distribution networks that make up the WEM and NEM. We found that there could be up to a 150% difference in the network tariff savings based on the very same...
Aggregating the future in the US
In September 2020, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued Order 2222, which removed barriers to the participation of distributed energy resources (DERs) in wholesale electricity markets for energy, capacity, and ancillary services. DERs including roof-top...
Battery Storage in a 5-minute Market
On 1 October 2021 the National Electricity Market on Australia’s east coast will take the significant step of moving from 30-minute to 5-minute settlement. This will doubtless have lots of interesting ramifications, one of which is likely to be that anyone who...
EV Charging: Friend or Foe?
Electric Vehicles are going to be a very big deal for energy systems right around the world. Even at their simplest they are pretty serious energy assets, with a relatively small EV like a Nissan Leaf still having a battery several times larger than a typical...
FCAS: The value stream everyone’s talking about
In recent times contingency FCAS has become a very lucrative revenue stream for participants in the NEM able to offer services into the various contingency markets. In particular, owners of battery storage systems have trousered some serious coin, often exceeding...
New Price Floor Milestone for Western Australian Wholesale Energy Market
Today the WA Wholesale Electricity Market hit the price floor of -$1000/MWh for the first time on a weekday. The long-term trend is clear, driven by the increasing decentralisation of energy.
Western Australia lets the tires down on rooftop solar
Yesterday, WA’s government announced a change to the regulated feed-in-tariff that’s offered to residential owners of solar PV. From November 2020, rather than receiving a flat 7c/kWh for excess solar exported to the grid, the new scheme will incorporate a...
Solar PV isn’t just about yield
Inspired by the lively discussion that resulted from Gavin Mooney's recent post on what direction to point roof-top solar systems, we crunched a few numbers to help inform the conversation. The analysis looks at a single commercial load shape (I picked an office...
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