Energypreneurs

Chris Cooper co-founded Orchestra Technologies, software that models and operates commercial and industrial energy projects — solar, batteries, EV charging, virtual power plants. More than 35,000 projects have run through it.

His argument is uncomfortable for anyone selling battery revenue. The speculative front-of-meter income — frequency services, wholesale arbitrage — gets cannibalised as more batteries arrive. FCAS in Australia is already not what it was. As he puts it: batteries eat battery revenue. Which matters, because if that income is what justifies the project, the whole case is dead on arrival.

Then the behavioural problem. Australia has a lot of home batteries and only about one in ten is connected to a virtual power plant, because people don't want someone else controlling their battery — even when they're paid for it. And a car is worse, because you need it charged when you need it.

We also get into behind-the-meter versus front-of-meter markets for listeners outside Australia, and what a commercial or industrial site should actually do first.

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Is the electricity grid really becoming optional? In this episode, Sohail Hasnie explores how rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs and vehicle-to-grid technology are changing the relationship between households and the traditional electricity grid. Using Australia, Hawaii and Pakistan as examples, the discussion examines self-consumption, battery storage, virtual energy networks, grid "death spirals," and the growing ability of homes and neighborhoods to generate, store and manage their own electricity.

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For three and a half years we've charged our car from an ordinary power point. Two kilowatts — about a kettle. Thirty-two thousand kilometres, roughly four megawatt-hours, less electricity than one Australian house uses in a year.

I set off this morning thinking seven-kilowatt home chargers should be restricted. By the end of the drive I'd changed my mind, and the reason is the three hours of free midday power retailers now have to offer.

I brought Grok along to check my arithmetic. At one point it agreed with a number I'd got wrong.

Come and check your own numbers with me, not the ones in the LinkedIn posts.

This picks up where Ep 350 left off, Matt Rennie told me three EV chargers in one street can be a problem for a transformer. I think the answer isn't fewer chargers.

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Matt Rennie said something that stopped me. The entire growth of Australia's grid — two to three gigawatts a year — is going onto rooftops, between 10am and 4pm. That leaves the other eighteen hours as a separate problem, and nobody has solved it yet.

Then it got sharper. When his team asked a California control room what EV uptake was doing to the network, someone said it was like watching transformers pop like popcorn in a pan.

Come and think it through with me.

Matt Rennie is founder of Rennie Advisory — 110 people across six cities. Previously EY's global leader for utilities, strategy and transactions.

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John Mather has worked in electricity markets in more than a dozen countries. He started at PowerGen in 1990, weeks before privatisation, when the UK was inventing the first electricity market anyone had built. He was in the room for the Longford gas crisis in Victoria. So when he says the two nuclear plants Britain is currently paying EDF to build will be white elephants by the time they commission, it's worth hearing why.

His argument: the technology has moved too fast for centralised generation to make sense. Australia's rooftop solar penetration is unmatched anywhere in the world, South Australia leads on home batteries, and the wholesale price here is heading to zero or near zero for ten or twelve hours a day. That changes what a grid is for — and it makes energy-intensive industry a mobile asset that will follow cheap power.

We also get into why private companies adopt new energy technology faster than public ones, why the UK is falling behind Australia on EVs, and what "peak" and "off-peak" even mean once storage is everywhere. Connect with Sohail Hasnie:

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Many of the home batteries Australians are buying under the federal scheme won't pay for themselves. Jon Sibley says so plainly — and he's not against them. He designed rebate programs for a living, and bought one himself in 2017.

If the numbers don't explain why 450,000 households have done this, something else does. We buy what our neighbours have, what governments put money behind, what becomes a thing you have. Which raises a real question: are subsidies buying hardware, or buying legitimacy?

Then the part that does stack up. Time-of-use tariffs are "okay, but wrong most of the time." Dynamic pricing is better — but only with automation, because nobody thinks about their dishwasher at 4pm. And under a dynamic tariff, a car battery stops being an income stream and becomes a physical hedge against price spikes.

Jon Sibley is a consultant working on consumer energy resources integration.

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Everyone knows greenwashing. Helen Neal is more worried about its opposite — green hushing, where companies making real climate progress stay silent because the risk of getting a claim wrong now outweighs the benefit of talking at all. A 20-year communications specialist who once brought the first EVs into Europe, she's sharp on why "business sense" beats "moral duty," where greenwashing actually comes from inside a company, and why you should never test a sustainability claim on a general AI — including what her team built instead.

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Bruce Nordman spent decades at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working on demand flexibility. He returns with an argument that cuts against most of what the industry is building: the grid should stop at the meter.

Everything behind it — solar, batteries, water heaters, EVs — belongs to the customer, coordinated by one mechanism: price. Not aggregators. Not cloud platforms. Not utilities micromanaging your devices.

— Standards vs. platforms: what VPPs make you pay for — The case for low-voltage DC — solar is DC, batteries are DC, so why convert twice? — Why under 5% of Californian EV owners let the utility touch their charger — The Bell Labs story: how the smartest engineers alive dismissed the internet

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One in three Australian homes now has solar on the roof. Nobody built a power station to make it happen — millions of households just did it themselves.

That's the largest distributed energy build in history, and it started as a rounding error.

In Brief 03, we distill hundreds of expert conversations into one argument: solar didn't win on policy or ideology. It won because it got cheap, then kept getting cheaper.

We cover: — How solar became the cheapest electricity humanity has ever generated — Why Australia's rooftops are the template for everywhere else — What breaks when the sun does the work — and why storage is the answer

340+ conversations. 1 brief.

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Back in 2018, Ozzeir Khan ran an experiment at the Asian Development Bank: could AI predict GDP better than the bank's PhD economists? It came remarkably close. The economists' verdict — if you can't explain it, it's no good, even if it's right.

Eight years on, that argument is over. We talk about what generative AI is doing to document-centric institutions — development banks, law firms, investment banks — and who it displaces first. Ozzeir's answer is uncomfortable: not just the entry-level roles, but the middle management layer, and it's already showing up in the Amazon and Microsoft layoffs.

Also: why the skill that matters now is asking better questions rather than finding answers, and why the biggest disruption he sees is to his own profession — software engineering.

Ozzeir Khan is Director and CIO | Operations and Country Engagement at the World Bank, previously Director of Digital Innovation at the Asian Development Bank.

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