Investment Director Ivor Frischknecht will present at The Clean Technology Revolution, China and Australia Conference

Ivor Frischnecht will present at

~The Clean Technology Revolution, China and Australia~

Workshop, 8 September 2011

The workshop will focus on two themes:

• Adopting a low carbon pattern of development in China and Australia
  Debate the necessity, and scope, of deeper structural reforms to each nation’s economy in tackling rising energy use and carbon emissions as well as realising the opportunities of green growth
• Australia, China and the Clean Technology Revolution
  Examine the development of ‘low carbon’ clean technologies in China and the implications for Australia with an emphasis on identifying potential partnerships and complementary relations in the energy and clean-technology sectors.

http://www.vu.edu.au/events/implementing-effective-climate-policies-international-conference-and-workshop

Ivor will look at the topic of  ”Facing Commercialization of Clean Technology”







Cleantech Investment Director Ivor Frischknecht will present at the 2011 Climate Change and Business Conference

Starfish Venture’s Ivor Frischknecht will be presenting on cleantech investment opportunities in Australia & New Zealand as part of the Climate Finance session of the 7th Australia – New Zealand Climate Change & Business Conference, to be held August 1-2 in Wellington NZ.

The two day business event offers a comprehensive program on domestic & international policy, NZ ETS learnings, transport, geosequestration potential, low carbon cities, product carbon footprinting, carbon communication best practice.  For further details go to www.climateandbusiness.com

EnerNOC buys Energy Response: a Starfish perspective

Ivor Frischnecht – Investment Director

Today Starfish announced the sale of renewable energy portfolio company Energy  Response to EnerNOC, the world’s biggest demand response (DR) company. It’s a very good result for both Starfish’s and Energy Response’s investors.

However, what I’m really excited about is the potential for DR, given how critical it is to the rollout of renewable energy. I’d like to share my excitement and explain why Starfish is likely to make more investments in this area.

What is DR? It is users of energy (demand) reducing their use of energy temporarily at a time of peak use or other grid emergency. Usually we’re talking electricity, but it could be gas, or water for that matter. I’ll stick with electricity for now.
Since DR can drop aggregate demand on a network by 10-20%, it can greatly delay the need for costly new infrastructure which is behind Australia’s double digit annual percentage increases in electricity rates. Even more important, it enables intermittent renewable energy, such as wind or solar to become a substantial portion of electricity generation without storage—usually prohibitively expensive—or gas-fired backup. No wonder renewable energy isn’t cost competitive with fossil fuels if one has to build a gas-fired power station alongside every solar farm! In contrast, DR allows demand on the grid to adjust in the event of a sudden lull in the wind or a cloud passing over a solar farm.

How does DR work? Today it is limited to industrial electricity loads being turned off or back-up generators being turned on. The grid doesn’t care which of these two occur; either way the load has dropped off the grid. This activity can last for seconds or hours. Mostly DR consists of loads being turned off: cool rooms, electric steel furnaces, large pumps, ore crushers and industrial heaters. However, commercial buildings and data centres (a rapidly increasing portion of society’s computing resource) have backup generators that are turned on regularly for maintenance anyway; they might as well be turned on when there is some value to the grid.
In the near future, once smart meters are more prevalent, households will also be able to participate in DR programs by temporarily reducing air-conditioning or heating for example. They will be compensated for this. All sorts of technologies and services are being developed to allow households and businesses to remain in control.
A lot of the intelligence in DR is in the aggregation process; a mini steel smelter may only be able to turn off for an hour before the metal starts solidifying, for example, and yet the grid company requires a four hour shut down; a large water pump may be on or off, in an unpredictable manner; and a military base cannot participate in a DR program during an emergency, but is happy to do so the other 98% of the time. EnerNOC, Energy Response and others like them are experts in delivering a guaranteed DR capacity to electricity networks by finding, managing and appropriately aggregating industrial and commercial loads.

Why isn’t there more DR? Two words: it’s coming; but electricity is a conservative industry and change doesn’t happen quickly. The rules governing electricity networks determine the extent to which DR is supplied. Most North American networks support DR and there has been a competitive market there for perhaps five years. Western Australia and NZ both have very active and valuable DR contributions to the grid which are growing rapidly. Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) does not have DR-friendly rules, and the agenda is largely set by generators (which have little incentive to support demand reduction), so political impetus will be required to allow DR to make a significant contribution. This is a requirement if we are to adopt renewable energy at any great scale on Australia’s principal electricity network.