New big battery turns on in SA region
A new SA energy storage company is using AI to manage its big batteries with its first project online in a country town.
South Australian energy storage company Lunio Energy has turned on a big new storage battery and has started trading in the National Electricity Market (NEM).
The Strathalbyn battery has the capacity to power 4000 homes for four hours, and uses artificial intelligence technology to work out the best times to buy and sell electricity into the NEM.
Lunio Energy CEO and founder Seth Thuraisingham told InDaily the project was two years in the making, with his company’s business plan based on low overheads thanks to AI – savings he wanted to pass onto consumers.
The Strathalbyn battery is connected to the grid and uses AI to respond to the market in real time. It stores energy when it is abundant and cheap, and returns it to the grid when needed most.
Thuraisingham hoped to develop more batteries saying he wanted to find a way to make energy prices cheaper for South Australians.
You might like
“The reason why this whole project started is I asked the question: ‘Why are energy prices rising so much higher than the rate of inflation?’,” Thuraisingham said.
“I wanted to solve that problem. This is the first asset that we’ve delivered to contribute to helping solve that problem.”
He hoped the battery would ease pressure on the broader market and could kick in when there was strain on the system.
Stay informed, daily
“We’re going to need a lot more batteries over the next five years,” he said.
Lunio was not generating electricity itself, and Thuraisingham hoped his company would stand out because it was established from the beginning as an “AI-native” business.
“We’re very efficient internally in how we use technology and tools to manage the whole supply chain; the delivery, the operation, compliance and maintenance of the battery,” Thuraisingham said.
“Our cost per megawatt hour is very competitive.
“There is AI-native operations within the business. What that means is we have very low overheads to be able to operate the batteries.”
His battery was “completely autonomous”, he said, “It trades – buys and sells – in the market in an autonomous way”.
By managing the volatility of the energy market, Thuraisingham said he hoped to avoid mistakes of other energy providers and battery operators such as Zen Energy, which recently appointed administrators.
“[Zen Energy] highlights the need for good financial management and having a solid CFO that helps manage the volatility of the energy market,” he said.
“Having good financial practices and risk management processes in place is going to be important for us going forward.”
Want to see more stories from InDaily SA in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily SA as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily SA". That's it.
