Age of electrification exposing Australia’s weakest link

As utility-scale solar, wind and battery projects reshape the way electricity is generated and stored, households have quietly delivered a recent victory with the Cheaper Home Batteries Program delivering 10.7 GWh of storage to the grid.

The years that Australia has devoted to solving the supply side of the energy transition has finally paid off at a time when the world is battling a global oil crisis that is speeding up the pace of electrification.

This has been evidenced by how quickly Australian consumers are turning their attention towards electrification. In March, close to 16,000 electric vehicles were sold in Australia and this has increased to one in six vehicles that were sold in April that were fully electric. With more households using EVs, installing home batteries or reducing their reliance on gas appliances, the predictable and stable electricity demand profiles are increasingly more dynamic with a shift towards more concentrated demand.

The same pattern from commercial and industrial businesses is only starting to emerge. Businesses facing the shock of rising diesel and fuel costs will accelerate their investments in transport fleet electrification and charging infrastructure, energy storage and industrial electrification to reduce their exposure to the global fuel market. At the same time as electricity demand grows with existing energy consumers, data centres that are being planned are placing increasing pressure on the grid.

While the global oil crisis has accelerated demand, Australia’s electricity networks were not designed to support the simultaneous growth in EV charging, consumer energy resources and the always-on data centre loads.

Data to support investment decisions in high-voltage networks and greater visibility of low-voltage networks are both critical if DNSPs are to support the growth of electrification. In many cases, DNSPs do not have full visibility or the capability to predict or manage changing demand conditions at the edge of the grid in real-time.

Without visibility, electrification will result in higher network costs and reliability challenges that energy consumers will ultimately have to pay for. But this does not have to be the case if technologies such as low-voltage network monitoring, predictive fault detection and data can be used to support network infrastructure investments.

Australia spent decades solving generation capacity and it would need to look at investments in transmission, distribution and visibility of the grid edge as electrification picks up pace. Instead of risking overbuilding its grid infrastructure in some locations while underinvesting in others, the age of electrification will ultimately be defined less by how much renewable energy capacity Australia delivers but more by how intelligently we can manage demand once millions of devices and connections start activating the grid simultaneously.

Author: Ana Duran, Product Manager, EA Technology