Empower Energy in Davis has passed some important new milestones since we last visited with them in 2018.  They redesigned their home storage device to be more compact and more powerful.  Even more importantly, they have been certified as an electrical appliance in Australia which has opened the door to actual customer installations. 

Then in 2019, Empower got another boost as the government in New South Wales announced a subsidy program for homeowners to install battery systems.  The subsidy is in the form of no-interest loans for families to purchase solar and batteries.  Up to 300,000 households will be able to access loans of up to A$9,000 per battery system and up to A$14,000 per solar-battery combo.   This is a 10-year $3.2 billion program with a competitive selection of suppliers qualifying for the subsidy. Empower CEO Ezra Beeman is hopeful similar subsidies will be created in California, particularly with the new requirement that all new homes have rooftop PV installed.

Now Empower’s biggest challenge is assembling the capital to begin manufacturing to meet the new demand for systems in Australia and the US.  The Empower product is a “smart” battery system that does more than store energy and can manage power flows at the distribution level into and out of homes, one of the rare few that have this feature.  Ezra is talking to investors as well as strategic partners.  He will be discussing his adventures at our CleanStart To-Do session at 9 am on August 6.

Like many students, I have been trying to see what I could do with my coursework in defining a career.  At Sacramento State, I chose a math major because I knew, combined with my minor in computer science, it would be the best combination of the two fields I loved the most. I also chose an emphasis in Statistics to go along with my math degree. I do not know what my profession will be, I just know what I like to do. So I talked with someone who was using my two passions in their own career in the Energy Sector.

Miles Butler was a physics student who now works at Energia. Surprisingly transitioning from physics to electricity, he realized that he needed to see everything as a collection of models and assumptions. He looks at the various loadshapes of energy use of houses. Taking this data, he works towards making the energy more efficient (expand on this more), and the main work he does is finding the impacts on distribution networks and performing distribution planning projects.

These mathematical models are representations of potential energy demand and supply loads in the future.  There are generally two things he looks at: Network and Non-network solutions. Network solutions, which are physical equipment that has to be bought, is typically more complicated and harder. Non-network solutions, like influencing customer use through energy efficiency plans and peak charges, are easier but are limited through regulation and elasticity of customer energy demand.  Balancing them is important, that is where Models come in, examining the tradeoffs and customer behaviors under different conditions.

One thing that surprised me were the margins of error. Margins of errors did not bother Miles because models are not designed to tell facts, but instead to explore dynamics. With models, one is exploring how someone’s actions and expectations impact the grid, but expectations and behaviors are constantly changing. These changing expectations make modeling important for exploring and preparing a Utility for the Future, especially with how much utilities want to push people to clean energy.

Models are based on statistics and it seems that my emphasis in statistics would suit that very well if I chose to go into this sector. All STEM eventually goes back to mathematics.

It was good to find out there were some immediate applications of what I had been learning in classes.  Sometimes it seems like classes and careers don’t overlap.  But clearly they do.