Thomas MacDonald

I’m a Senior Consultant working on energy markets at Aurecon in the Sustainability and Climate Change division. My work involves understanding and modelling the techno-economic aspects of the ongoing energy transition in Australia, specifically the NEM. Some of the topics I’ve worked on recently include:

• Updating and maintaining an internal energy market model based on AEMO’s Integrated Systems Plan (ISP), including cooperation with the software developers on new functionality needed to properly capture newly emerging market phenomena
• Developing new code to simulate the ability of grid-scale batteries to profit from energy arbitrage - buying and storing low-priced energy to sell later at a higher price.
• Analysing the commercial opportunities available to new renewable energy and battery development proposals
• Developing new data visualisations to effectively communicate findings within the topics above

Before leaving for private-sector consulting I was a researcher in physical chemistry with interests in supramolecular assembly, molecular photophysics, and molecular implementations of logic and computing. My work involved a combination of theoretical modelling and experimental spectroscopy, and particular emphasis on method development and application in magnetic resonance (both NMR and ESR). From July 2020 to December 2022 I worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dane McCamey at the UNSW School of Physics, funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science. This project has had two main focuses: a theoretical exploration of the possibilities of using excitonic processes for logic and information processing, and experimetnal electron spin resonance (ESR) studies of exotic high-spin multiexcitons resulting from singlet fission. Prior to that (2016–2020) I did my PhD in chemistry with Jon Beves at the UNSW School of Chemistry, where I studied different approaches to controlling molecular and supramolecular transport in solution. This work was largely in physical organic chemistry, with extensive use of diffusion NMR spectroscopy (including method development) to characterise these processes. I also did some (largely theoretical) work modelling the characteristics of an original design for a self-amplifying molecular-photonic logic device.

My non-professional interests include English folk music and dance, films, digital technology, and open source intelligence (particularly remote sensing).