Obsessing over ideas since about 2003… or earlier?

~ 2003

I had this idea that we should farm energy from urban environments - think wind tunnels created by tall buildings through the city, solar panels instead of windows.

Turn out that was a bad idea - turbulent wind that feels fast on your face, does not equal viable wind farming. Empirical data and the laws of physics win. At the time, replacing windows with solar panels was equally fanciful thanks to economics.

But I only learnt all that by doing a Masters in Sustainable Energy at RMIT, and by starting a process of testing my ideas against reality.

~ 2006 - 2012

I had this idea that we could change the world for the better, if only “the government” listens to us. They will listen to us if we present to them sound logic and reason backed by evidence, and if we represent the views of the many.

Gee I worked had at this idea !

I did original research on barriers to distributed generation which helped drive network connection standards for solar, and submissions like this on barriers to demand side participation. I pulled together a 600-page report on the value proposition for distributed energy at CSIRO, and aimed to shed new light on an old problem, highlighitng the role of business model innovation.

In sum, I did about 35 briefings, workshops and conferences over an 18 month period, explaining the virtues of distributed energy. In retrospect, that effort was about 10 years too early, but not in vain.

My experience has been that this idea does not scale well in the real world. There are so many forces at play, and brave politics only seems to survive in protected niches. It doesn’t help that in Australian society, we have very limited tolerance for “failure”.

2012 - 2020

So I figured, maybe we change the world for better with good ideas that precede good execution. I’ve been testing that hypothesis by coming up with good ideas for enterprise, and seeing if they change the world.

• I worked on Victoria’s first zero emission home projects, “The Cape”.

• We crowdfunded $400k for “the people’s solar”.

• We explored “off grid tipping points”, and what might happen if consumers unplug from the grid in projects like Tyalgum Energy Project.

• Finally we built boompower - a SaaS platform to accelerate uptake of distributed energy solutions.

Turns out this approach has more truth to it than not. I have had some success in shifting how we think about clean energy in Australia.

But when it comes to building “enterprise as the solution”, scale demands capital, and capital demands returns. Australian investors are typically very conservative. So what do we do about it?

zero emission housing

In 2012, I started working with the then “cape paterson ecovillage”, now “The Cape” Australia’s first zero emission housing project. It was already a good idea, that I helped make better by combining economics and energy insight to optimise design and performance against cost.

I also recruited a team of outstanding architects and designers to the project, and helped engaged potential project investors.

communities should go off grid

When I co-founded Energy for the People, I pursued “the idea” that in order to accelerate energy market transformation, we had to take away customers from incumbents using solar, energy efficiency and battery storage. I consider this idea a success - Energy for the People was once named a “top 5 threat” to a utility monopoly business, based on work they did with communities planning off grid energy precincts. Combining projects with thought leadership over a six year period, EFTP played a role in shifting dialogue in Australia’s energy market to one of “how fast” things will change, from one of “if things will change”.