OptiGrid’s team is driven to help achieve a fully renewable energy grid by applying cutting-edge innovations tailored to industry needs.
Our mission is to unlock the full potential of batteries and renewable assets, improving their investment cases and accelerating the transition to a fully renewable energy grid. Our journey began at the University of Adelaide, where years of research into machine learning, AI, and optimisation models for electricity price forecasting and battery optimisation laid our foundation.
Since then, our team of software engineers, PhDs and energy industry experts have continued to refine our energy price prediction and battery optimisation models, ensuring they outperform best existing solutions.
Contact UsIn 2018, our Co-Founder, Ali Pourmousavi, had a profound realisation: large-scale batteries were on the path to revolutionise the grid, but their financial success depended on sophisticated operation and management systems that didn’t yet exist. The challenge was two-fold; batteries needed both accurate price forecasts to maximise market opportunities and advanced modelling to optimise operation while preventing unnecessary degradation.
What began as two research projects quickly grew. Over the years, our team developed increasingly sophisticated price forecasting algorithms, while advancing the science of battery operations. These parallel research streams finally converged into OptiGrid's founding mission: to unlock the full potential of grid-connected batteries in our renewable energy future.
South Australia has gone quickly from a fossil-powered laggard to having the world’s highest share of wind and solar in a gigawatt-scale grid, with a 75% share at June 2024. The state is targeting 100% net renewables by 2027. And it’s also part of Australia’s National Energy Market, which was one of the first jurisdictions globally to move to 5-minute settlements. While this is a cause for celebration, it comes with big challenges for energy market operators.
Think crypto or pork belly futures are volatile? They have nothing on Australian energy prices. The graph above shows electricity prices in South Australia on one day in 2017. In those days energy prices were much more predictable. Prices peaked when everyone got up and turned on the kettle in the morning, and in the evening when we came home from work.
Just seven years later, it’s a very different and much more unpredictable story. Prices commonly go negative in the middle of the day when renewable generation exceeds 100% of demand. At other times, the market peaks at 2x or 3x times the price it used to peak at. Forecasting electricity prices and responding to them just got so much harder. And it’s likely to get harder as the transition continues.
