Alex Sear from ADP Consulting reckons the title of our Buildings as Batteries event next Wednesday perfectly captures the big changes underway in our world today: the climate crisis, EVs and EV charging, renewable energy and mandatory reporting of carbon emissions. Just for starters.
Then there is the immense improvement in technology making buildings a lot more intelligent than they’ve ever been.
“This topic is at the intersection of all those big topics,” he said during our briefing ahead of his presentation on Wednesday.
Melbourne based Sears will be a brilliant addition to our event.
He’s led the decarbonisation strategy for one of the country’s biggest property owners (we’ll reveal which one on the day) and led the direct decarbonisation of 26 of its biggest commercial assets, along with related work for Riverlee, QIC, and Federation Square in Melbourne.
“So removing gas, and what’d I’d say is we’ve now got the controls in all of our systems to be able to make sure that building operations happen during the peak of the day or when the sun is shining, and we can actually shift the load as well.”
So the time of use story as well.
It’s bang on in alignment with the work from Buildings Alive’s Craig Roussac, who we need to give credit to for the title of this event that someone else said on Thursday “markets itself”. Perfect.
Both Roussac and Sears are the kind of people who can see the giant beams of light of transformation struggling to break through the cracks of our rusted-on old habits.
The potential is there to seize.
We have two forms of buildings, Sears continued. “There’s the physical batteries and there’s the car batteries.”
The latter may offer way more potential than you think (certainly more than we thought). They’re huge Sears said.
The other – which is also Roussac’s line – is that the building itself is a battery. So, for example, heating the building in the middle of the day when the sun is abundant and free, explains Sears. And then switching on appliances at night when the grid switches to the dark side (coal-fired) unless you have batteries number 1 in play.
Sears notes we’ve got all the technologies to achieve this – but we don’t do it. Ditto Roussac.
Why not?
Sears points to the potential of big asset owners and what they can do with wholesale variable tariffs. But you need to be very competent and have a “lot of confidence in your building controls to pull it off”.
So for years and years we’ve been hearing about sophisticated building controls that can change the game for all of us.
What happened?
They’re there, Sears said, “We do really have the technologies…”
What’s missing as always is the incentive or payback to make change happen. We need this for the asset owners, the grid managers and owners, and then there is the delicate art of the politics to make all this happen in concert. In fact everyone in the delivery chain.
If that happens, we can get grid responsive system, EV batteries that do their thing and tech that unleashes its full potential.
In the room on Wednesday will be EV charging experts, tenants and owners of big industrial and commercial properties, engineers, experts in power purchase agreements, consultants and other professionals.
Many people see the enormous possibilities of transformation.
We’ve spoken to many experts in the past weeks and they will be there on the day, on stage or in the audience. The audience by the way will be seeded with multiple potential for spotlight spots… which is where we encourage contribution to the collective knowledge pool.
Because right now there are way too many issues to deal with for any one company to and many solutions that remain to be found.
– Tina Perinotto