Tess Rickard

Biography

Tess Rickard is a renewable energy engineer passionate about accelerating Australia’s transition to renewable energy in a way that is safe, reliable and fair. She currently works in transmission planning at Ausgrid, the electricity distributor serving much of Sydney, where she assesses new generator and battery connections to the grid. Tess graduated from UNSW with First Class Honours and the University Medal in Renewable Energy Engineering. Her honours research explored the use of generative modelling for data augmentation of luminescence images of photovoltaic cells. She is particularly interested in how electricity networks can adapt to increasing levels of distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicles. Outside engineering, Tess has played representative football and futsal for more than a decade and enjoys hiking and travelling.