Elton Lu, Graduate Engineer at WSP is passionate about finding more sustainable energy alternatives, and investigating a range of potential energy storage solutions that could help to combat climate change.

What motivates you in your career, and what drove you to be in this field/ role?  

Stripping it back to the basics, I just want to be working on something that can benefit our society and in particular, combatting global warming and climate change. I’m sure a lot of people have a similar mindset which can manifest in different interests and passions like wanting to improve public transport or carbon capture technology. I personally find renewable power generation very interesting, probably from what I was exposed to at university doing my research heavy degree. I had done mini research projects with professors on solar PV manufacturing, molten salt storage for solar thermal and operation algorithms for large batteries. 

What is something you would like to see change in your industry?

A push for conventional and emerging forms of energy storage from pumped hydro to hauling train cars full of rocks up a hill, to chemical battery storage like lithium-ion to lead-acid or other low cost metals. For example, utility scale lithium batteries have seen an increase in implementation and decrease in price due to technological leaps brought on by the uptake of electric vehicles. However, power density, one of the great advantages of lithium batteries, isn’t that useful for utility scale because you don’t need it to fit in a car chassis or phone case. There are other types of chemical batteries that can potentially be much cheaper than lithium, and they should be researched, funded and brought to industry too. 

How would this change impact people or society? 

We need energy storage to allow for a greater proportion of renewables in the grid. As we move toward renewables - for example the NSW government plans to put in five new Renewable Energy Zones - we will see a larger imbalance in when most energy is produced and when most energy is needed. Particularly in the case of solar PV, most energy is produced during the day but we use most energy in the evening (google Duck Curve, it’s a real problem already!). Therefore, we need more energy storage to be able to capture this energy and shift it to times of high demand, allowing more renewables to be developed and baseload coal generation to be replaced.   

What are some of the barriers to this change, and how are you/your team working around them? 

Many big projects are based on government funding which in turn is driven by politics, elections and voter knowledge and awareness. I think we need to make electricity and renewables ‘sexy’ or at least something to care about. Most people right now would consider electricity as just an annoying bill they pay every quarter that somehow keeps increasing despite using LED bulbs more and the AC less. The effects of ‘dirty’ power generation are so far removed from public awareness that unless you live next to a smoke stack, you won’t see the insidious effects it has on the environment and global warming. While it definitely helps, to me it seems like it’ll be more difficult convincing industries and people to use less power than it is to make sure that power is produced in a clean manner.