Big 'n' small: can micro-grid based renewables guarantee sustainable energy supply?
An Australian experience.

-- a _kt75 | reprint






When Ergon Energy began a Solar Cities program on Magnetic Island to try to make the isolated community as efficient and self sustaining as possible – and avoid an expensive new cable to the mainland grid – one of the first things it did was to remove all the old bar fridges. It filled up more than a shipping container and took them off the island. Bar fridges, explains Ergon Energy CEO Ian McLeod, are usually old, and terribly inefficient. Roofs on the island were also painted white to dissipate the effects of the sun’s heat on household interiors. Solar was installed and the new cable deferred for nearly a decade. Now, with storage about to be installed on Magnetic Island, the new cable will probably never be needed. This is now becoming the model for regional and isolated communities around Australia. Inefficient appliances like old bar fridges are being replaced, local generation is being installed, and that is being followed by energy storage – probably installed in the garage where the old bar fridge used to be. Australian network operators, particularly those in regional areas with lower population levels, have accepted that new technologies – mostly centred around localised renewable generation, energy storage, and some smart software – are a better and cheaper option than just adding more poles and wires.

As McLeod suggests, this is a dramatic change, both in the culture and the economic driver of these organisations: “Our role is not to be a transporter of energy from central power stations to customers, because that is the old model. That is how we used to do it,” he told the Energy Networks Association conference in Melbourne this week. Instead, he envisages the network becoming a partner and facilitator, to encourage consumers to invest in installation. “People can choose between green and black energy, clean and dirty, they can use it, they can store it, they can sell it,” McLeod says. “What we are seeing is a transfer of capital from the networks into the customer installations.” This is a massive shift in just a few years from an industry accused (probably quite accurately) of gold plating and boosting its asset values in order to lift its regulated returns. McLeod is not the only one who thinks this way. Rob Stobbe, who heads SA Power Networks, told the same conference that rural communities would likely look after their own generation needs in the near future. “We might just be operating, managing and building micro-grids, in localised areas, with their own renewables on site, and some of their other renewables that could support that community. Why wouldn’t that work?” Stobbe said. Indeed, Stobbe said centralised generation and transmission could be made redundant by distributed generation, a prediction he shares with Frank Tudor, the CEO of Horizon Energy – Western Australia’s regional utility, which is already looking to base energy supply in some remote towns around local generation and storage. Read on ...

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