"We've designed our entire business and the products we make around doing that for us to get to there."
Concerned about a shortfall in electricity supply after the shutdown of AGL's Liddell coal-fired power station in the NSW Hunter Valley, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a pre-budget announcement in September the government wanted to build 1000 megawatts of gas-fired generation to fill the gap.
Helping the Opera House
But critics have pointed out that the Australian Energy Market Operator says only a fraction of that is needed, about 150 megawatts.
And Mr van der Linden is urging the government to rethink this intervention, saying better power demand management and batteries will prove far better investments for customers in the coming years.
"Give us a little bit of time, don't pull the rug out from under our feet, regulatory speaking,” Mr van der Linden said.
One of Flow Power's core offerings to customers is a device called a "kWatch", which gives customers the ability to watch their electricity use in real time and manage their demand.
This device has helped Flow Power's engineers, for example, set up automated systems at a cold storage firm, which cuts bills and emissions by pre-cooling the refrigerated storage and allowing a partial shutdown within a temperature range.
The device also crucially gives customers the ability to manage high electricity costs when there is a shortfall of power by voluntarily load shedding – cutting power usage when supply is low and prices are high.
Blackouts are the most extreme version of load shedding, when power companies reduce electricity consumption by switching off the power supply to groups of customers because the entire system is at risk.
"Last summer our load halved during the most critical time in the market. So if we were five times bigger, or 10 times bigger, and that continued, that is huge for the reliability and the direction the market's going in.
"Could we be five times bigger in the next one to two years? Yes, we absolutely could. And that's the trajectory."
Flow Power recorded a 0.1 per cent drop in August revenue compared with August last year, but the figure was a 9.1 per cent improvement on July.
Mr van der Linden is so confident about the retailer's growth trajectory that the firm in August acquired a majority stake in iEnergy, a small solar panel installation business, to bring its installations in-house.
Flow Power counts Newcastle-based steelmaker Molycop and the Sydney Opera House as customers, giving them the ability to contract directly with wind and solar farms to buy power at a lower cost than is available through traditional retailers.
Molycop has slashed its electricity emissions by 40 per cent through signing up to renewable energy contracts and better managing its power use to melt down scrap metal to make various steel products such as rail tracks and ball bearings.
Read more in the Frontline Fallout series, including how Flow Power fared last month.
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October 11, 2020 at 08:00PM
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Flow Power wary of government intervention in electricity market - The Australian Financial Review
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