Sunshine Hydro
Rick McElhinney is the CEO of Sunshine Hydro.
Australia's Queensland is where pumped storage 2.0 is becoming a reality. The industry-wide practice since the first pumped storage facility started up has been to follow a regular schedule. Pumping up water levels during off-peak. Letting water out during peak. Rick McElhinney's company, called Sunshine Hydro, instead combines real-time data on regional energy sources and uses with advanced modelling to operate pumped storage more dynamically and opportunistically. To find out the secret sauce that promises to dramatically drive up pumped hydro's value in the clean-energy transformation, Public Utilities Fortnightly sat down with McElhinney for the following conversation.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: What's this mission you're on?
Rick McElhinney: Our vision is, literally, to contribute to the decarbonization of the planet using technology. Our mission, that you asked about, is to create firm green power stations worldwide that supply twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year.
Technology was vital from day one. That's where it started with Chris Baker, the company's founder, back in 2015. The question he set out to answer is, how do I create a mechanism where renewable energy is optimized? That's why to this very day, optimization is at the core of what we do.