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.
Speaker
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Mark Paterson is Energy Catalyst’s Principal and Lead Systems Architect. With over two decades in the energy sector, Mark works at the intersection of strategic futures and scalable, ‘least regrets’ action. At CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, he led several major energy system transformation projects as Chair of the CSIRO Future Grid Forum and Program Director of the CSIRO/ENA Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap. At energy utilities Horizon Power and Energex, he led the innovative development and scale deployment of several technology innovation firsts. Over much of the last decade, Mark has been privileged to develop leading expertise in Systems Architecture-based disciplines which are now increasingly recognised as critical for enabling the deep decarbonization of legacy power systems. He is formally trained in both the Systems Architecture and Grid Architecture methodologies developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the US Department of Energy’s Grid Modernisation Laboratory Consortia (GMLC) respectively. Focused on future-informed action, this expertise is further complemented by Strategic Foresight and Technology Roadmapping methodologies developed by EDHEC in Europe and Cambridge University in the UK.
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