SXSW Eco Festival Texas

Hi, I’m Jervis Whitley. Today is Friday, 23rd of August, and you’re listening to WindFront, the weekly roundup of the wind industry from Australia and around the world. Today I’ll cover the South by Southwest Eco Festival in Texas, America, and the weekly top 3 earners.

Now, South by Southwest Eco Festival is a conference, which is all about future technologies and things like that to do with the environment and climate change and energy and land and water and things like that. My particular interest is obviously in the energy aspect of it. And they’ve got a bit of a thing going on where they’ve highlighted a bunch of startup companies who are new to the area, that are doing some really great things, and highlighted them to become finalists and compete to see who can be the best eco startup. And I’ve had a look through some of the finalists there, and I’ll give you some of my thoughts and a bit about which ones look interesting.

It seems like the hot topic is the turning of the industry into more of a tech space. It must be over the years that it was seen by many as being fairly backwards in terms of technology, and there seems to be now a plethora of new startups and small companies trying to tackle the large amount of data that energy companies always had, whether or not this will lead to any real benefits. It’d be interesting to see in the medium to long term. But it’s definitely a change that’s sweeping through.

Now we’re having a look at their startup showcase. They’re judged by quite a prestigious panel, including the man that invented ethernet. These small companies have been selected to become part of this startup showcase. And there’s some interesting ones in there, from a ride sharing concept for taxis, through to one that I found interesting, which was a wind turbine data company, which analyses the, at the moment, lubricant system, and Scada data that comes out of your wind farm, to find whether or not there are trends and patterns which would point towards a turbine failing early, and what they can do is take all of this data from you and clean it up and have a look for these patterns and suggest some preventative maintenance be done on these turbines before something goes wrong.

And I found it quite interesting that this company is, it’s called Fluitec Wind. They are a subsidiary of a larger company called Fluitec, which is, it seems to have been fairly involved with the lubricant sort of area for heavier machinery. And I guess that’s why they’re tackling that 1st, in the 1st instance, for wind, which is where their experience is. Looking through their white papers and other documents that got available on their website, it seemed to be what they were doing was taking the data in any format that they could get and just sort of massaging it in Excel spreadsheets and applying their, I guess, know how to it, and returning that back to the wind farm owners. And from there, those humble beginnings, they’ve actually gotten over $3 million worth of funding from government grants and things like that, which is really a fantastic result for them.

So a broad range of companies that have been selected for this startup finalist panel, would be interesting to see who gets judged the winner.

And now onto the top 3 in wind. We’ve had a huge week this week, Macarthur, over $2 million and the lead, Lake Bonney itself, over $1 million, and Waubra just under $1 million this week. South Australia and Victoria combined both together had over $10 million, really a large week in wind this week.

Until I see you next time, keep buying those green electrons.