Balance Of Power

Greensync Ceo Dr Phil Blythe Is Confident That With The Growth Of Renewables The Company Can Enable Better Ways To Share Energy.

- Stephen Crowe

Although the way he went about it seems unusual, he has no qualms now. Through happenstance, Phil Blythe changed careers based on a gut feeling he couldn’t ignore. He started out as an aerospace engineer at Boeing, before studying for a PhD in artificial intelligence for autonomous drones in the 1990s. He also spent time working in cognitive psychology, financial engineering and even cryptography.

But then everything changed. Reports about climate change caught his attention, and he saw a way to help the industry adjust to the resulting growth in renewable energy.

“Ten years ago, I was looking at the impacts of climate change and it started to get press,” says Phil. “What we’re going to do about it in the energy space with the rise of renewable sources of energy seemed pretty much unknown, so my concept was designing software technology to address that problem.”

The transition towards renewables has been very rapid in some regions, including Australia. Growth in renewable energy generation, according to Phil, is causing challenges for the energy grid.

He founded GreenSync with a view to navigating the challenges of integrating distributed energy resources into the grid to ensure it would operate safely, reliably and as cost-effectively as possible. “We’re a hybrid tech company that’s focused on building software technology for the energy industry,” he says.

“While essential to our future energy system, renewables are causing some physical challenges for those operating our existing grid infrastructure,” Phil explains.

Every year that goes by the existing system is pushed to the brink with excess renewable power in the middle of the day.