Max is still on holiday. I am still in Sydney. Here’s what happened on Day 2 of the Smart Energy 2026 Conference & Expo in Sydney.
My day started with a walk from the Rocks via Barangaroo to the conference centre, taking in one of nature’s greatest harbours, and arriving just in time for the leader of the Greens, Larissa Waters’ talk.
Larissa Waters: Yes, But…
The day before, Chris Bowen walked into an overflowing auditorium and his words were lapped up by an adoring crowd frequently erupting into rapturous applause. The industry and the minister have $7.2 billion worth of reasons to be nice to each other, and they were.
Waters walked into the same room, about 15% full of delegates.
The Greens Senator opened by naming the first thing Labor did with its historic supermajority: approve a massive new coal mine with an operating life running to 2070. She literally accused the government of “climate denial”.
She acknowledged recent wins: the battery numbers, the recent gains in EV uptake, the gas at a 27-year low – but Waters’ argument is that the same government is simultaneously approving “carbon bombs” with 40-year lifespans, gifting billions in subsidies to profitable miners, and protecting gas companies from meaningful taxation.
She also had pointed things to say about the EV road user charge reform the government is considering. Done well, it prices pollution and congestion. Done badly, i.e. the current trajectory, it exempts petrol and diesel vehicles while slugging EV drivers, achieves nothing on emissions, and hands the opposition a gift.
The audience that gave Bowen a group hug and cheers sat quietly through most of this. Which is its own kind of answer about where the industry’s political comfort zone lies.
CSIRO: Let’s Be Smart About Demand Too
CSIRO’s Gabriel Kuiper delivered a dense, genuinely important talk on flexible demand while the entire audience sat in silence wearing wireless headphones. It was like a silent disco that only plays policy analysis. I think the world needs fewer people lost between their own headphones to be honest, but the talk itself was worth the existential discomfort.
What is flexible demand?
Kuiper told us how Australia has spent enormous energy counting widgets – solar panels, batteries, EVs. We’ve long lead the world in rooftop solar per person and increasingly in home batteries. The next frontier is the services those widgets can provide, and the biggest untapped service is flexible demand.
That means getting household loads – hot water systems, air conditioners, pool pumps, EV chargers – to shift when they run based on what the grid needs. None of this requires new hardware. Most of it just needs a timer and a signal and coordination.
UTS calculated there’s 22 GW of flexibility available from smart hot water systems alone. Serious grid-scale storage delivered through appliances people already own, at a fraction of the cost of batteries.
The opportunity
Kuiper’s meta-analysis of Australian studies puts the net present value of properly integrating distributed energy resources – including flexible demand – at $19 billion by 2040.
Britain is showing what this looks like in practice. Last year the network congestion managed by distributed loads doubled, from 4.5 to 9 gigawatts. A 10kWh battery owner there can earn up to £331 a year just for easing local network pressure. Australia has no equivalent national mechanism.
What’s blocking it
The biggest problem is network regulation. Distribution networks earn a regulated return based on the size of their asset base – currently around $95 billion in poles, wires and substations. There is no level playing field between “build more infrastructure” and “use flexible demand instead.” The incentive to build always wins.
Kuiper also bemoaned that VPPs offer no transparency on how profits are split between the aggregator and the device owner. My take: that kills consumer trust and uptake. Only Amber is transparent about this stuff – hence their success at attracting customers.
And ridiculously, consumers still can’t access their own real-time energy data from their retailer smart meters. And there is still no technical standards body for distributed energy resources in Australia.
Britain started seriously working on this in 2010 and is seeing great returns. Kuiper’s assessment: Australia is about 16 years behind.
SolaX’s Clever V2H Workaround
Hat tip to Neerav Bhatt who covered this in detail yesterday – his video is worth watching.
One of the cleverest products at the show was the SolaX AC charger, which solves the V2H problem by refusing to engage with it directly.
Solax’s Pseudo Bi Directional Charger
Proper vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid requires DC bidirectional charging – a compatible DC charger, a compatible car, potential car warranty headaches, and in most cases network approval from your DNSP. It’s the reason V2G remains almost entirely theoretical in Australian homes despite years of excitement.
But most non-Tesla EVs already have V2L – vehicle-to-load – which is simply an AC output from the charge port, warranted by the manufacturer. It’s designed for running a kettle on a camping trip: the output is typically 2-3 kW AC.
The SolaX AC charger uses that V2L function and passes the power from the car into a compatible SolaX hybrid inverter via this charger. The inverter treats the car as just another AC source and uses that power to run the home or reduce grid draw. No DC conversion, no warranty risk, no DNSP approval process (the inverter already has that tick). Expected retail is around $3,000 for the 2-way wall charger compared to around $1,000 for the uni-directional version.
It won’t discharge your battery at the rate of a proper V2H setup: 2-3kW is the ceiling the car’s V2L output allows. But for most households that will cover a meaningful chunk of evening peak, and it works right now, with cars people already own.
Anker: Designed for the Rebate
Something you don’t often see at trade shows: a product that has clearly been engineered around a specific policy, and has done it well.
Anker’s new battery stack has 7kWh modules. That’s not a coincidence, the Cheaper Home Batteries rebate tiers from May 1 land at 14kWh and 28kWh. Two modules to max out the highest rebate tier ($3,800) and another two to take advantage of the next tier ($2,280) . Someone did their homework.
28 kWh, 10 kW, 2 battery modules, 2 inverter/battery modules (with the displays)
The inverter architecture is also worth noting. Rather than a separate inverter box and battery modules, Anker has built a combined inverter/battery module. Initially that sounds like a limitation – each inverter is only 5kW – but the answer is just stack more modules. Want 10kW of inverter? Two inverter/battery units. Anker’s claim the combined module isn’t significantly more expensive than a plain battery module.
The 10,000 cycles warranty is nice too. They’ve engineered a warranty that easily handles two full cycles per day for 10 years. Charge from cheap daytime solar, empty into the evening peak, then charge again on off-peak night rates ready for the morning. Many battery warranties discourage that kind of usage. Anker has embraced it and it makes the most of the smaller batteries being sold post May 1.
And yes, they’re still probably the best looking stacks on the market, which shouldn’t matter and somehow does.
My Takeaway From Two Days
Bowen’s scoreboard on Day 1 was real. The numbers are genuinely good. Kuiper is asking us to be smarter than throwing giant batteries at every problem. Anker, SolaX and others are turning clever ideas into products at speed. The industry is moving.
But Waters’ reality-check stays with me. I walked to the conference along one of the great harbours of the world. My grandkids will do the same walk one day. Whether it’s a comparable experience depends on decisions being made right now: including some being made by the government this conference was cheering on yesterday.
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