Guided by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, our research themes focus on identifying real-world challenges and finding solutions that will not only enable Australia to successfully digitise its energy grid, but play a leading role in the global transition to sustainable energy capture, storage and supply.

In the short to medium term, this means understanding how we can retrofit the existing grid to allow feeding of renewable and distributed energy sources – and making sure the grid is robust enough to cater for surges in demand.

Our long-term vision is to play a key role in enabling the global transition to net zero through creating a new digital energy grid. This will  join together distributed energy sources and allow for the incorporation of technologies to make our cities ‘smarter’, improve on generation and storage of power from renewable energy, and provide robust physical and cyber infrastructures with supporting regulatory, legal, social, economic and political frameworks to ensure long term viability.

UNSW Sydney already has an incredible track record in this space – 90 per cent of the world’s solar panels are manufactured with IP born from our research – and we look forward to continuing this global impact through our ongoing research.