CSIRO lectures

Last night I went along to the CSIRO Energy Transformed Flagship lecture series at the CSIRO Energy Centre on the Steel River Estate.

The first speaker talked about how the National Solar Energy Centre was continuing its collaborative research into efficient, low emission energy generation particularly renewables and hydrogen. An interesting point made was that if all the electricity needs of Newcastle were to be satisfied from existing solar panel technologies they could be met from an area of 4 kilometres by 4 kilometres of solar panels, certainly a lot less than the rooftops of buildings in Newcastle.

The second speaker outlined the Distributed Energy Management and Control project which is looking for ways to improve the efficiency of electricity utilities and networks by facilitating the way they interact with their customer base. An example could be "smart agents" that receive and communicate information such as consumer preferences, price signals, weather conditions, etc between neighbouring sites and remote utilities to control when appliances are switched on and off.

Check out the CSIRO website and Newcastle Council's ClimateCam website.