General Meeting Results

Members are advised of the outcome of the General Meeting, held on 2 July. More than 80% of the votes supported each of the two motions put to the Members. An Interim Committee was elected, comprising:

President: Glenn Maddock (77)

Vice-President, Male: Rod Broune (75)

Vice-President, Female: Margot Cooper (75)

Secretary: Don Newby (67)

Treasurer: Paul Steenson (67)

Committee Members: Alan Allison (67), Julia Bovard (65), Maria Castellanos (75), Gordon Hill (62), Julie Ivison (65), Ian McLaughlin (73), Helen Sarantopoulos (88), Adam Tran (91).

Fort Fest

Friday, 20 September 2024, from 3:15 to 8:00 at the school. Come along for a wonderful evening of food, entertainment, games, stalls, and so much more. This year’s Fort Fest will also celebrate 175 years of Fort Street High School.

Please use the link https://form.jotform.com/gabrielleearls/fortfest2024 if you can provide sponsorship for Fort Fest or donations for prizes.

Fortians’ Stories

Ray BINNS (1954) says: “Despite the Headmaster saying I should become a nuclear physicist, I became a geologist, graduating BSc from Sydney, then PhD from Cambridge. I taught at UNE Armidale and UWA Perth before joining CSIRO to lead its Division of Mineralogy in Sydney.”

He retired in 2002 but retained an Honorary Fellowship at CSIRO until last year. He enjoyed a great career, including work on many Australian mines, international travel, and marine expeditions. He may not have become an astronaut, but he worked on meteorites and the Apollo moon rocks anyway. “Instead, I became a Hydronaut, diving to nearly 3 km in the Bismarck and Solomon Seas with Soviet and Japanese submersibles.”

Maria Skyllas-Kazacos (1969), Emeritus Professor, UNSW Sydney

Flow Batteries for Large-Scale Solar and Wind Storage in the Transition to Renewables

Maria Skyllas-Kazacos AM FTSE is best known for her pioneering work on the vanadium redox battery, which she developed at the University of New South Wales in the 1980s. Her design used sulfuric acid electrolytes and was patented by the university. In 1999, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia “for service to science and technology, particularly in the development of the vanadium redox battery as an alternative power source.” Below is her account of this work.

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the birth of the Vanadium Flow Battery (VFB) at UNSW Sydney. It all started in 1984 with the first experiments carried out by Honours Thesis student Elaine Sum (who subsequently completed her PhD in Aluminium smelting). Over the next 40 years, hundreds of students and researchers expanded the research and development of VFB technology at UNSW, pioneering advancements in electrolytes, membranes, electrodes, sensors, stack design, and battery management systems.

UNSW filed the first patent on the VFB in 1986, and by 1993, Thai Gypsum Products was granted a licence for the South-East Asian region. Around the same time, the university granted a licence to Kashima-Kita Electric Power Corporation and Mitsubishi Chemicals. This was followed by a five-year R&D collaboration between UNSW and the Japanese companies, leading to the first commercial-scale 200 kW / 800 kWh VFB installed at the Kashima-Kita Electric Power Plant for load-levelling trials in 1987. Several field trials were also undertaken in a solar-powered house, an electric golf cart, and an emergency backup system for submarines.

The UNSW VFB patents were sold to Pinnacle VRB in 1998, and a licence was subsequently granted to Sumitomo Electric Industries in Japan. Despite the early licensing and field testing, it took more than 25 years for the energy storage market to mature, allowing the technology to gain significant commercial uptake in medium- to large-scale systems.

Since 2015, interest in vanadium flow batteries for long-duration energy storage has grown exponentially as the world transitions to renewables in response to climate change. Unlike common batteries, flow batteries employ two redox couple solutions that react at inert electrodes in a cell stack. The energy capacity of a flow battery depends on the volume of electrolyte and active material concentration, while the power rating is determined by stack size. Flow batteries also have lower fire safety risks than lithium batteries and are more cost-effective for long-duration storage. They feature fast response, high energy efficiency, long service life, flexible design, and a relatively low environmental impact.

China currently leads the world in VFB implementation, with GWh-scale storage systems already installed, including a 200 MW/800 MWh VFB integrated with a wind farm by Rongke Power in Dalian. With Australia’s large vanadium reserves, there is growing potential for a local industry around vanadium mining, processing, and battery manufacturing. Several Australian companies are now producing vanadium electrolyte, and multiple MW-scale VFB installations are being planned across the country.

After growing up with the Vanadium Flow Battery for 40 years, my family came together in January this year to visit UNSW and see the commercial VFB installation in the Tyree Building. It was a special moment captured in a family photograph featuring my husband Michael (who worked on the VFB project for almost 20 years at UNSW and co-founded the spin-off company V-Fuel in 2005), and my sons Nick (who spent his university holidays volunteering in the VFB lab and later worked at V-Fuel), George (who also contributed to VFB development at V-Fuel), and Anthony (who attended countless technical conferences with me as he grew up). Unfortunately, V-Fuel was wound up in 2010 because the energy storage market was not yet ready.

Phil Kafcaloudes (1977)

Dr. Phil Kafcaloudes is a writer, academic, and broadcaster. He worked for the ABC for 26 years as a TV political reporter and radio presenter and has taught at La Trobe and RMIT universities. His PhD examined the legitimacy of telling true stories in a fictional context. 1977 alumni Phil Kafcaloudes is about to stage his first play, Of Forgetting, a three-hander that tells the true story of his maternal grandmother, a spy in Greece during WWII. It is an adaptation of his 2011 novel, Someone Else’s War, which was translated into Greek for the European market.

The play will be staged at Melbourne’s legendary La Mama Theatre in Carlton in September and will be directed by Gary Young, who originated the Australian productions of Mamma Mia! and The Mousetrap. Phil’s grandmother will be played by his real-life partner, Jackie Rees (Green Room nominee for her portrayal of Madame Giry in Phantom of the Opera). Casting for the other two roles is expected to take place in June.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Phil says. “La Mama has such a great history, especially notable for being the place where David Williamson staged his first play half a century ago. It’s an intimate theatre, and the people behind the scenes are just fantastic.”

Phil hopes to eventually turn the story into a TV mini-series. It has been a busy year for the writer and long-time ABC broadcaster. He has been commissioned by a British publisher to write the biography of hard rock superstars Deep Purple, and in between interviewing rock legends, he has had two academic papers published this year, including one about why many Greek migrants anglicised their names upon arrival in Australia.

But Phil credits Fort Street for forming his love of writing: “Mrs. Williams was my Year 12 English teacher in 1977, working with us in a demountable on the north end of the school abutting what was then Miller’s brewery. She awakened in me a joy in the writing of Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, George Eliot, and John Donne. As a child philistine, I had always considered each of them turgid, self-obsessed overwriters. She set me straight, and I wish I could find her to thank her for it.”

Phil and Jackie now live in Melbourne with Molly, a border-kelpie who rules their lives. Of Forgetting will be staged from September 10–12 as part of La Mama’s Explorations program.