- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer, and today we're joined with Chris Thompson,
the co-founder and CEO from Amber Electric.
Chris, I'm stoked to have you on the show today
'cause I just read, actually, as I woke up this morning,
that you guys have won the Governor of Victoria's
Startup of the Year Award.
That's so cool, congratulations.
Can you start by telling our audience a little bit
about Amber Electric and your background as well?
- Yeah, thanks, Aley.
We're really humbled by this.
I mean, I think, you know, at the end of the day with that,
though, we don't actually do anything ourselves,
it's all our customers' work
and all our customers' making impact.
So it's a real tribute, I think,
to us having the most amazing customers of anyone
in the energy business.
Amber really started from an observation
about where we are right now in our energy transition.
So, increasingly, we are starting to power Australia
by wind and by sun, which is amazing, right?
But obviously it's not always windy
and it's not always sunny.
And so, increasingly, the challenge we're starting to see
in the overall energy grid
is that we actually can't integrate more renewables
into the grid.
So we're actually running to the limits of how much wind
and sun we can actually get, in the energy grid.
And so that's really where Amber comes in.
So we're an entirely new way to buy power.
And so we pass through realtime, wholesale prices
directly through to customers.
So what happens in our wholesale energy market
is that when it's windy and sunny,
we get these renewables flooding into the grid
and pushing down wholesale prices.
And then at other times when we're relying on coal and gas,
electricity gets much more expensive.
So what we do with Amber is we actually pass through
the realtime, wholesale prices directly
through to customers,
and we provide them the transparency to be able to
actually see what's going on in the grid.
And so customers can actually start to use power
at those cheaper and greener times, which saves them money
and actually builds demand for renewables at the same time
I started my career at Boston Consulting Group.
So I was working for large corporates here in Australia,
as well as about Southeast Asia a little bit.
I was briefly actually in investment banking before that
but I made a much better consultant than banker.
And then after a few years of consulting,
I actually took a pretty hard right turn.
So I moved to Iran and I spent two years in Iran
building an e-commerce company there.
So basically trying to build the Amazon of Iran,
which was a pretty wild, wild journey, as you can imagine.
I joined that company about six months
after it had launched and ended up becoming
one of the two managing directors.
And we grew that up about 400 people on the team.
- Wow, I mean, you have such an interesting background.
I'm absolutely astonished by everything you've accomplished.
And I would really love to hear one day
a little bit more about your time in Iran.
That's so cool.
But Chris, Amber Electric, to get back on track,
is doing some amazing work in the clean energy space.
So I wanted to ask you,
how was Amber Electric redefining end consumer behavior
for clean energy?
- Yeah, so we're really on a mission to bring Australia
to 100% renewables, and increasingly,
one of the most powerful ways that we can do that is
actually help customers shift when they need energy.
So, back in the old days when it was mostly a a coal-
and gas-fired grid, it didn't really matter
when you turned things on.
The coal and gas would ramp up and ramp down,
just to basically run.
But when you're dealing in world power by renewables,
it doesn't work that way anymore.
When it's windy and sunny, you get this cheap,
wholesale energy coming to the grid.
And then at other times when it's not wind and sunny
you have to rely on this dirty coal and gas.
So what we're actually doing is giving people
the transparency about what's going on in the wholesale
and in the overall grid,
and how much of their power is coming from renewables
at any given point in time.
And then increasingly,
we're helping customers to automatically use more power
at those cheaper and greener times.
So the biggest focus that we have is actually looking
at large devices, such as home batteries or electric cars
where we actually automate those devices to
automatically turn on and charge when it's cheap and green
and automatically turn off or even potentially
discharge back into the grid when it's dirty and expensive.
And so you really see this playing out,
I think, most acutely, when you look at
something like an electric car.
So if you're buying an electric car,
which is an amazing thing to be able to do
for the environment, then if you're coming home
and charging that at 6:00 every night,
you're basically running your car on coal and gas, right?
Which, you know, why would you do that?
(laughs)
You've gone from oil to coal and gas,
which is maybe a bit of an improvement, but not a big one.
But if you're actually charging
that EV in the middle of the night
on a nice windy night or during the middle of the day
when it's coming almost entirely from solar,
then all of a sudden you're running that EV on 80%-plus
renewable energy, which obviously, then,
you're really starting to make a much bigger difference
than if you're just relying on coal and gas.
- Yeah, 100%.
We actually last month got--
We've had solar for a while, we got a battery put in,
a Tesla battery, and it's so fascinating.
I've got the app on my phone and I'm forever, you know,
looking at when it's peak time.
And it's pretty amazing.
But as you say, the time when you choose to turn
on the dishwasher and charge your car is so critical
because, as you say, if you're doing it when it's not sunny
for us with solar, you're just using
coal and gas again, so 100%.
- Absolutely, and I think we also
starting to see that there's--
And seeing this sort of distributed energy revolution
start to happen is people, like yourself,
to be able to actually automate that battery
to actually start to compete in the market
and drive out that coal and gas.
Right? - Yeah.
- So at the moment, the coal and gas plants
are often waiting 'til the sun is about to set,
to then start to ramp up their prices and charge you more.
But if you've got a battery, then all of a sudden
you can sort of entirely reverse that, flip that around
and start actually earning those prices for yourself
with your battery, rather than--
And at the same time,
powering your neighbors with their stored solar
which is way better than having to rely on
that coal and gas.
- So cool.
The apps are pretty phenomenal as well.
Like, being able to see that data
and being able to monitor it hour by hour,
well, actually, second by second, is pretty cool.
So, 100%.
Chris, I wanted to ask you,
'cause Amber Electric recently went through
a re-architecture on AWS.
You know, it's really important to handle
those peaky workloads for wholesale energy prices.
So can you tell us a little bit more
about the ups and downs of peaky workloads?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So, the energy market is a incredibly dynamic market.
I believe it's actually one
of the most dynamic commodity market
in the whole world, the Australian energy market.
And because so much of what we do is driven by the market,
we need to have a really dynamic and flexible
engineering and product setup as well.
So we have a really event-driven architecture
and we rely heavily on over the serverless
sort of frameworks,
and a serverless sort of architectural style.
So a lot of Lambdas, is a lot of Cues,
a lot of off-the-shelf product from AWS.
I feel like every six to nine months we run into
a new bottleneck on part of it,
and so we have to keep doubling down again and again
on how do we make sure we get this architecture really,
really lean, 'cause we may find ourselves, you know,
during a price event in the market where a giant coal plant
may trip and the whole grid is on edge
and where potentially you're gonna be seeing
people lose power.
And at those points in time we wanna be dispatching
all our batteries, making sure we're controlling
all the devices we can control
to try and help keep the power on for everyone
as well as minimize people's prices.
And so that means we need to be taking all those actions
you know, within the space of 1, 2, 3 seconds, right?
As soon as we get that notification about what's happening
in the market, we need to be able to respond
incredibly quickly and and respond across, you know,
tens of thousands of customers and devices.
So to be able to do that,
we rely heavily on the AWS infrastructure
and systems to be able to take in these actions
and then very, very rapidly, at times,
scale up to tens of thousands of different
as your Lambda is running simultaneously to try
and get those out and get notifications
and responses out to devices and customers as well.
- It's really cool.
I mean, obviously it's amazing
that you've been able to deliver better experiences
and products as a result of the partnership,
but you know, if I think of like the best use-case
for an AWS kind of customer,
it really is this volatile ups and down customer.
So thank you so much for sharing.
Chris, to round up this interview,
what future technologies are you excited about
that will help catapult Australia's pathway
into this 100% renewable future kind of goal
that we've got at the moment?
- I mean, I've mentioned them a little bit before
already in the chat, but the number one device
that is gonna change the whole game here
is electric vehicles.
An electric vehicle often has a--
Well, usually has battery that is five to 10 times
the size of a typical home battery,
and fully charged, provides for the average house
enough power to be able to run for, you know,
three to four days independently.
And as we start to get that fleet
of electric cars across Australia rolling up and up,
we're likely to get to the point, you know,
probably in the next sort of five to 10 years
where that fleet of electric cars are by far and away
the biggest generation asset in the country.
And so this opportunity of being able to, you know,
power your home from your EV, and kind of
the classic image we have is, you know,
you drive to work during the day,
your business has solar installed on the roof.
You plug your EV and at work there,
you're charged from that cheap solar energy coming in
from your work and from the grid during the day.
You come home, you arrive home,
you plug your car back in at sort of 6:00,
and all of a sudden you you're powering your house
from your car now, and vehicle to grid is kind of that term.
And that's increasingly becoming available here
in Australia as well.
And so you're powering your house from that car,
you're starting to power your neighbor's house
from that car as well,
and starting to make sure they're really driving that coal
out by this whole fleet of EVs.
You're discharging into the grid at 6:00 each night.
And then as the winds start to blow overnight,
maybe top your car up a little bit more.
As you wake up in the morning
your car kicks back in and starts powering your house again.
And then the cycle just continues.
And really, I think what we're likely to see in Australia
is this mix of solar plus EVs
being kind of the dominant source of energy for the country,
which is gonna be this incredible sort of,
you know, diverse, distributed future
there that's gonna be really amazing to see.
- I agree.
It's such an exciting space.
You're clearly so passionate about it.
I'm still learning, but I find it so fascinating as well.
It is a complete game changer
and it's so important to start building now, actually.
So we can start utilizing that technology
as soon as it does become more affordable
and available in Australia.
So thank you so much
for educating me, for educating our audiences,
and we absolutely love you guys as a customer.
So thanks for coming on the show.
- Thanks, Aley.
- Thanks, Chris.