Future built on sustainable energy

Newcastle Herald
Wednesday 4/7/2007 Page: 18

Newcastle is perfectly positioned to be a world leader in renewable energy, the city's business leaders were told yesterday. CSIRO energy systems manager James McGregor said the city's links to "energy-hungry" sectors through coal export, as well as its research resources and skilled work force, made it ideal. "We have all of the right conditions to set Newcastle up as the next Silicon Valley of the sustainable energy industry," Mr McGregor told Newcastle Business Club.

Newcastle's CSIRO Energy Centre is researching and trialling a device that allows communication between homes and can predict peak power demand, possibly averting the kind of chaos experienced in the Hunter during the Queen's Birthday storms. Called smart agents, the devices can predict a spike in the electricity price that coincides with the network being under pressure.

"If in the storm the other week we'd had agents distributing power generation so everyone had solar power in the home and wind turbines or little fuel-cells in the backyard, we had agents controlling our airconditioning systems and they were all talking together on a network, these agents could actually make decisions on getting the grid up and running automatically based on little nodes that were still interconnected [after the storm]," Mr McGregor said.

He said that, in the age of climate change, the future lay in developing a mix of energy sources, including clean coal, solar and wind energy and technology not yet dreamt up. "Networks are at full capacity so we need to be bringing technologies to fill the gap that can also reduce our carbon footprints," Mr McGregor said.