Duwayno Robertson is the Principal Energy Storage Consultant at DNV. He is a highly respected engineering professional with a background in stationary energy storage, automotive battery development, software and hardware system architecture and design. He has participated in Standards Australia’s Young Leaders Program and currently contributes to Australian Standards and is a member of the Standards Development and Accreditation Committee.  

After graduating from Hampton University in 1997, Duwayno Robertson began his career at Lockheed Martin, which inspired the direction his career took—specialising in electric vehicles and stationary energy storage. He arrived in Australia from the United States in 2015, working with AGL Energy as their Energy Storage Applications Engineering Manager.  

His role at AGL Energy was to assist in developing South Australia’s Virtual Power Plant, a project that will see a network of potentially 50,000 solar and Tesla battery systems formed to create the world’s biggest virtual power plant. Mr Robertson assisted with the aggregation of residential batteries to help stabilise the State’s energy grid.

Shortly after moving to Australia, he became an active contributor to Standards Australia. Mr Robertson was already familiar with standards, having been a validation engineer at General Motors and a design release engineer at Fisker Automotive. In 2018, he worked as a homologation engineer at Enphase Energy in Melbourne, Australia.  

“It’s a fancy way of saying standards engineer,” said Mr Robertson.

“With my background knowledge in standards and compliance, I began asking which Australian standards related to battery energy storage – lithium specifically,” Mr Robertson said.  

Mr Robertson says there wasn’t much knowledge around lithium battery standards at that time, so he began to investigate what relevant standards were available.  

"I couldn’t find any relevant Australian standards. I even asked around AGL, ‘who is the standards person here?’".  

“It turns out there wasn’t one, so I became the ‘standards person,’” he said.  

From there, Mr Robertson became and continues to be an active member on several technical committees such as EV-019, E-waste and EM-001, Electric Vehicle Operation.  Additionally, Mr. Robertson is the chairperson of EL-005, Secondary Batteries.  

In 2018 he participated in Standards Australia’s Young Leaders Program (now known as NEXTgen).

“It was perfect timing when I joined as it gave me a better understanding of Standards Australia’s history and processes,” said Mr Robertson.

“It informed me why committees are formed with so many different technical experts with competing interests and how and why Standards Australia facilitates consensus. Overall, it positively impacted my work on the committees I was already a member.”

Since then, he has been actively helping shape the dialogue around what our next generation contributors value, need and want, building a standards system for tomorrow.

Following changes to Standards Australia’s company constitution in 2021, Mr Robertson became a member of the Standards Development and Accreditation Committee (SDAC) as a Young Leaders alumnus representative. SDAC accredits bodies in Australia to develop and maintain Australian Standards. It also sets policies and guidelines for developing and maintaining Australian Standards, including preparing and publishing Australian Standards. It audits the accredited bodies to ensure they are compliant with the policies and guidelines set out.  

Now, as the Principal Energy Storage Consultant at DNV, Mr Robertson has become a trusted voice, helping to tackle the global energy crisis. 

His dedication to sustainable energy will help shape the standards for sustainable energy and the industry that supports its advancement. 

"Standards support confidence in implementing and using sustainable energy solutions, such as lithium-ion batteries," Mr Robertson said.  

“Duwayno’s impact across national and international standards will be seen within his industry for future generations of electrical engineers to benefit from,” said Adam Stingemore, General Manager, Engagement and Communications at Standards Australia.  

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