No longer one way – Australian Power Distribution

Decarbonisation is the catalyst for the evolving power industry in Australia. With the availability of significant amounts of land and natural resources (wind and sun), there is an unstoppable trend of renewable energy entering the Australian market. The move away from coal to renewable energy has been highly publicised in the Australian media in the last 12 months with a number of announcements regarding the lifespan of significant assets.

Unlike in Europe where renewable energy was introduced gradually to the market through subsidies and support, in Australia it has been more of a landslide. This has provided significant challenges to the distribution companies who need to transform quickly, safely and efficiently to best represent their customers and maintain network supply.

For some distribution companies, the advent of large-scale solar and renewable developers wishing to connect to the network has provided significant opportunity. A recent estimate put this demand at more than double the current network load. In addition to the commercial and industrial scope, there are changes at the micro level too. Customers are beginning to embrace solar PVs on their rooves on a much more widespread scale and some are installing behind-the-meter battery technologies.

This is not without challenge. Traditionally electricity distribution has been a simple linear process with generation entering the network and being distributed to retailers to sell on to customers. Suddenly we are seeing disruption to this linear flow with customers, through distributed generation, looking to put electrons back into the grid. In most cases, the grid is not prepared for generators to push electrons in both directions. The situation has become much more volatile and dynamic with customers now generating and exporting as well as buying.

Network operators will have to change their grids to deal with this transformation safely. However not everything has to be fixed by network build. There are a number of on demand-side solutions with Virtual Power Plants and blockchain trading ways to address capacity issues.

The last two years has been without doubt the time of the VPP – the cloud-based power plant that aggregates the capacities of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to boost power generation, and trade power on the open market.

The evolution of the power sector is happening at rapid pace unseen before.

The move from a Distributed Network Operator to Distributed System Operator (DNO to DSO) is a term often banded about. This relates to a move from controlling and maintaining the network to taking a more active role in managing local electricity generation and use.

Whatever changes happen, the focus of distributions companies for providing safe and effective network at a reasonable price remains the same.

Matthew Woodall is an Energy sector Search specialist with over 20 years in the industry. For further insights and regular industry updates please connect with him on LinkedIn.