Navigating Australia’s Grid Transformation: A Postcard from the Future
Australia’s GW-scale electric power systems are experiencing some of the world’s fastest transformations and provide something of a ‘postcard from the future’ for many jurisdictions. These transformational forces are impacting all vertical layers of the legacy system, including bulk power, transmission, distribution and energy retail. Australian energy customers are also actively influencing the nature of the transformation to a degree that is without precedent in the history of electric grids.
In the context of accelerating withdrawal of dispatchable synchronous generation, Australia’s transformation is being supercharged by massive deployment of utility-scale Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) and world-leading levels of Distributed Energy Resources (DER). As the proportion of VRE and DER continues to grow, a step-change uplift in system capabilities becomes essential to ready them for reliable and cost-efficient operation in deeply decarbonized future.
Leveraging Global Insight for Navigation
Digitalisation, interoperability, transport electrification, enhanced asset utilisation and Distribution System Operator (DSO) models, for example, all have much promise in such an environment. However, it is often poorly understood that all such solutions, and many others, cannot achieve their full potential without the underpinning structural relationships or ‘architecture’ of the grid being made future ready.
The presentation will highlight how the navigation of Australia’s transformation is increasingly informed by an integrated set of tools that support holistic grid transformation, many of which have benefited from seminal global research and development, especially in Europe and North America.
