ARENA grant awarded to increase interest in battery orchestration

Monday, 15 March 2021

UPowr has welcomed ARENA funding to explore how customer insights can be used in the design of battery orchestration programs to increase customer willingness to participate in them.

Launched in 2018, the Sydney based startup is redefining how households install solar and battery systems through a digital, personalised and end-to-end platform experience. Core to this approach is a focus on understanding how value changes amongst different households, and ensuring solar and battery systems can be optimised to deliver this value.

The $446,000 grant from ARENA will support UPowr in exploring one of the most pressing challenges the electricity grid is facing – supporting solar uptake while keeping the broader electricity grid stable.

With over 2.5 million households in Australia now with solar, the electricity grid is facing challenges from the amount of energy being exported back to the grid from these individual solar systems.

UPowr CEO and Co-founder Stu Philpot said that orchestrated batteries are understood to be one of the key ways to solve these challenges – and while people are buying batteries, the uptake of orchestration programs has been low.

“Residential solar has created challenges for the industry. But the way it’s currently being addressed – by reducing feed-in-tariffs, export limits and external ‘shut-down’ requirements, is not creating value for the customers who have installed solar,” Stu said.

“Batteries that are part of an orchestration program, optimised to do the right thing by the customer and the grid, can solve these challenges and still ensure that customers get value – our challenge is to do more in making these programs more aligned to customer values to encourage and incentivise more people to participate.”

The $943,155 project will develop a behavioural science based framework to guide the design and delivery of orchestration programs in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia. The three phase, 13 month project will blend research and demonstration to provide the energy industry with a framework for customer focused program design and delivery tested in-market.

UPowr Chief Customer Officer and Project Lead, Kiya Taylor, said that this approach will demonstrate how programs can be designed based on the values and needs of different customer segments.

“Over the past few years the industry has explored the technical, regulatory and market-based needs that orchestration programs are required to deliver. We now really need to focus on identifying the needs of customers and creating value that aligns to it,” Kiya said.

“This value will be different for different groups – which may not mean we need a bespoke program for every group, but it will mean we need to take a much more nuanced approach of connecting values and communicating it simply and clearly.”

The project, which commenced in January 2021, will run through to February 2022. More information about the project, along with a form to register interest, can be found here.