Simon Willis has spent his career building things that matter. Currently, he and his team at EPEC Technologies are finalising a new product that the renewable energy industry will soon be hearing about.
Simon came to renewables through a PhD in electronics engineering and nearly a decade in industrial automation and process control. He worked across minerals processing plants around the world, designing control systems and industrial products that had to perform reliably in physically demanding environments. After a while, he wanted to do something with that experience that felt more meaningful.
I wanted to do something more positive for the planet,” he says.
He landed at Redback Technologies in the early days of residential-scale battery and inverter systems. Over six years, Simon built and led a team that developed devices now installed across tens of thousands of systems nationally, along with a safety monitoring product rolled out across Queensland on close to 100,000 properties. It was fast-paced, technically demanding work that taught him how to move quickly, run complex hardware and software projects in parallel, and deliver. But he wanted to go bigger.
When Simon first met the EPEC team, the pitch was simple: help reduce delivery risk on large-scale battery energy storage systems by solving the integration problems between inverters, batteries, and energy management systems. The concepts were familiar. The scale was not. And that was the point.
It’s the same concepts, just much, much larger, and with more challenges than what I’d faced before,” he says. “One of the things I’ve learnt from years of process control is that to design the best control system, you need to fully understand all of the systems, how they interact, how they will be operated and always consider what might go wrong. With this knowledge, you can design a solution that is robust and matched to the application.
For Simon, joining EPEC wasn’t just a career move. It was a convergence. “What I’m doing at EPEC is kind of a molding of all of my past experience,” he says. The electronics background from his PhD, the process control knowledge from years in mining and minerals processing, the product development skills from Redback. At EPEC Technologies, it all comes together.
When Simon joined just over a year ago, EPEC Technologies was a team of two, Simon and fellow engineer Gareth Byrne. Today it’s grown to 10 engineers, including HIL specialists from across the broader EPEC team. The team works across two streams: developing EPEC’s own products and taking on control projects where there’s no off-the-shelf solution. Power plant controllers, advanced control algorithms, and custom integration work. If a complex problem needs solving, it comes to Technologies. And right now, the team is working on a new product that EPEC will be announcing soon.
A recent project brings this to life. An existing solar farm needed to add an AC-coupled battery energy storage system and came to EPEC for clause 5.3.9 services. The client had one firm condition: don’t touch the existing solar farm control system. Working alongside the EPEC Engineering team, Technologies developed a new active power control strategy and full specification for a setpoint control system sitting between the solar farm and the battery system. The result met all network service provider requirements while leaving the existing controls completely untouched.
It shows how the two teams can work together to provide end-to-end solutions for EPEC’s clients, Simon says.
The hardware-in-the-loop environment the Technologies team uses for product development is the same one the broader engineering team uses to reduce commissioning risk on major projects. As the tooling develops, it feeds back into the wider business.
We leverage EPEC’s HIL lab to test our products automatically overnight. Issues are identified before the day starts, and our engineers resolve them without needing all the manual processes,” he says. “It’s already saving us time and improving the quality of our products.
Simon’s focus is clear. He wants to see EPEC Technologies build products that fill specific market niches and genuinely help clients maximise the value of their investment. One year in, the team is well on their way.
EPEC Technologies is one year old and already delivering some of the most complex control work in the Australian renewable energy market. With a growing team, an expanding product offering, and no shortage of hard problems to solve, Simon and the team are just getting started.
