As director of UNSW’s Digital Grid Futures Institute, Professor John Fletcher is drawing on decades of global experience to help propel Australia towards a sustainable energy future.
In 1980s Scotland, a period of struggling industries and rising unemployment, job security was crucial for a young John Fletcher exploring his career options. He recalls discussing his future with his father, an electrical engineer himself, who persuaded John that the field would offer a stable career for life.
This advice led Fletcher to a globe-spanning career culminating in his current role as director of the Digital Grid Futures Institute (DGFI) at UNSW Sydney, where he’s helping to design a sustainable energy future for Australia.
Fletcher’s journey began with a Bachelor of electrical engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was during this that he met Australian expat academic, Professor Barry Williams, who convinced him to undertake a PhD – a decision and experience that Fletcher describes as one of the best in his life. Fletcher relished the opportunity to delve into diverse areas of electrical engineering through his research, which was focussed on electrical drive systems – systems that are used for controlling the speed, torque and direction of an electrical motor in anything from electric cars to washing machines.
A tale of two Aussies
Apart from his academic pursuits, Williams operated a research business for which he engaged his PhD students to help solve industry challenges. “He made me think about things like patents and intellectual property,” says Fletcher. “During my PhD, we patented three different techniques that I had worked on and developed, and that led to research grants.”
Besides patents and PhD, Fletcher spent his time playing in a rock band. He met his future wife, an Australian, at rehearsal one day, and in 1996, followed her to Sydney on a Working Holiday Visa.
During that first stint Down Under, Fletcher struggled to find work in his field. “I was hellbent on being an academic,” he says. “I’d got that bug, that idea that you had the time and space to do what you needed to do for your job, but also to invest in your own understanding of how things work, which is what engineers really want to do – they want to understand, build and have an impact.”
Fletcher found himself being drawn back to Scotland by his old supervisor. He spent the next 14 years at Heriot-Watt in various roles before joining Williams and the rest of his “academic family” in a move to the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Fletcher experienced his most productive academic period there, amassing a £5 million (AU$9.36 million) research portfolio in just three years.
Personal circumstances led Fletcher and his wife back to Australia in 2010. While this felt like a sacrifice at the time due to the momentum his Strathclyde research group had built, Fletcher says “it actually turned out to be a really fantastic move”.
Global energy trailblazer
Recognising the different academic culture in Australia, Fletcher used the move to Sydney as an opportunity to expand on his expertise beyond the area of research that he had become recognised for in Strathclyde – power conversion for aerospace applications. He wanted to explore new energy-related applications, from water treatment to health diagnostics, defence and electric transport. “Had I stayed in Strathclyde, I would not have had any of those other opportunities,” he says.
Scotland’s loss has been Australia’s gain. As a professor of energy systems in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at UNSW, Fletcher has cemented a reputation as a leader in clean energy technology. Over the past decade, he has been awarded or contributed to research grants exceeding $20 million, all with a focus on electrification and renewable energy. He has supervised 42 students to PhD and published 140 journal papers, along with conference papers, book chapters and patent submissions. He has also consulted for companies across the globe, including in the United Kingdom, United States, China, Europe and Japan.
Named director of UNSW’s DGFI in 2022, Fletcher brings together technical experts, entrepreneurs, economists and other specialists who might not otherwise have connected through traditional funding routes. The aim is to foster collaborations that will help solve the challenges involved in transitioning to the ‘digital grid’. It’s a term that Fletcher admits can be misleading: the grid itself (the poles, wires, power stations and other infrastructure that deliver power to our homes and businesses) remains an analogue system; digitising the grid refers to the “layer” of technology we need to integrate with it in order to transition to 100% renewable energy.
Australia has enthusiastically adopted renewables, which now represent about 30% of our electricity generation. Combined rooftop solar alone represents Australia’s largest electricity generator, comprising more than 3 million roofs and generating 17 gigawatts of power. But the problem that engineers like Fletcher are trying to solve is that these energy sources are all feeding into a grid designed for power generated by a few large (mostly coal) power stations.
That’s where the concept of a digital grid comes in – Australia needs to adapt its ageing infrastructure to accommodate today’s decentralised renewable energy generation, whilst maintaining the stability and reliability of the grid when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. The challenge is making the transition to a digital grid one that the average Australian won’t notice. “People want a stable energy system at a reasonable cost,” says Fletcher. “In many respects, you want it to be completely invisible.”
Precipice of change
Keeping the grid ‘invisible’ is a job that’s going to keep engineers busy for the foreseeable future. “There are lots of visions for how this grid might look and how we might control it, but no one has put a flag in the sand and said, ‘This is where we need to end up,’ because we have a range of possible solutions that could deliver that more sustainable energy system,” says Fletcher.
The task ahead is intimidating, but Fletcher is optimistic.
We have an opportunity, as a society, to address one of the biggest challenges that the planet has. We have an opportunity, as a nation, to be a world leader in some of the technologies that the rest of the world will need.”
In the short term, Fletcher’s goal is to see the funding he has distributed through the DGFI translating into commercial applications. He wants to see a push away from academic publications as a measure of success, and to have researchers incentivised to translate their work into real-world applications.
Australia isn’t alone in facing the challenge of transitioning to better systems for renewables, says Fletcher Time is of the essence, he says, if we want to take advantage of the economic opportunities that could come from leading the way.
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Story by Gemma Chilton