By Carrie Cox
Science, industry and government are having to work fast to prepare the State’s electricity grid for a perfect storm of change.
For all its complexity, Western Australia’s electricity system has largely operated in the same fashion for more than a century. Yes, the lights go out occasionally, especially after rain, but for the most part our State’s sprawling power system has worked just as its pioneers might have hoped back in 1888 when CJ Otte first fired up the Perth Electric Light and Power Company.
Back then and for most of the 20th century, the biggest challenge for WA’s engineers and decisionmakers was growing the Meccano set to keep pace with expansion. But suddenly, in what feels like the flick of a switch, ‘growth’ has given way to ‘overhaul’ as the buzzword in utility boardrooms. The conflation of solar energy take-up, serious renewable energy targets, electric vehicle usage, pricing volatility and new technologies has produced a perfect storm of wicked new problems to solve and opportunities to exploit.
Fortunately people such as Dr Chris Townsend, a power electronics expert within UWA’s School of Engineering, enjoys a challenge. Much of his work currently sits within a $2 million project to design power electronics that ensure electrical stability in regional WA microgrids. It’s one of a suite of programs funded by the Future Battery Industry Cooperative Research Centre, a federal initiative to maximise the potential of the battery industry and address the challenges of energy transition.
Dr Townsend says WA’s electricity system is at a critical juncture and current research has a vital role to play. “Utilities haven’t had to move quickly until now and so there’s some turbulence during that transition,” he says. “We’ve had a power system that’s operated the same way for more than 100 years and the existing workforce know how to operate that system really well, but now we have more and more renewable energy coming into that system and we’ve reached that tipping point where you are going to get more and more problems if you don’t invest wisely.”
Dr Townsend says one of the most important focuses for attention needs to be the interface between new energy sources and how they interact with the grid. “The grid is going to have to change a lot in that we’ve always had power electronics sitting at the end of it and they’ve predominantly associated with loads. More and more we’re going to see those power electronics embedded into the system, controlling the power flows. The utilities and their workforces haven’t had to deal with these devices in this way before, so there is going to be a large upheaval associated with that as not many people understand this technology and much of it is built overseas.”
Dr Townsend says one of the most important areas for attention needs to be the interface between new energy sources and how they interact with the grid. “The grid is going to have to change a lot in that we’ve always had power electronics sitting at the end of it and they’re predominantly associated with loads. More and more we’re going to see those power electronics embedded. into the system, controlling the power flows. The utilities and their workforces haven’t had to deal with these devices in this way before, so there is going to be a large upheaval associated with that, as not many people understand this technology and much of it is built overseas.”
Photovoltaic panels are a key part of the solution.
Industry education and local manufacturing have equally important roles to play in navigating the transition, according to Dr Townsend. “If you don’t have technology that is catered to the local conditions, you can have stability problems and potentially blackouts,” he says. “There needs to be more awareness of the need to build our own solutions.”
To that end, Dr Townsend’s research team has been working with Perth-based Australian company Magellan Power to design and build new interface technology for the WA grid. “Together we’ve just produced the first WA-designed 100kVA modular inverter system that will have immediate applications in energy storage, standalone power systems, microgrids and high-power electric vehicle chargers,” he says. “It’s an example of a lot of great work happening in WA with local manufacturers right across the battery value chain.
“I think WA has an opportunity to be the Australian leader in this space. We have the critical minerals here so it makes sense to manufacture storage technology here, so that ultimately we’re the masters of that technology and we can sell it to the rest of the world, rather than just digging up the resources and shipping them overseas.”
UWA has also been working with Western Power to produce new microcredential courses and targeted educational offerings to help upskill its workforce for the technological transitions ahead.
For all the innovation and investment happening in the State’s energy sector now, the overarching goals are modest: stability and cost-efficiency. Interestingly, these have a more complicated relationship since the advent of renewables.
“The advantage of the traditional system is that there are only a few big generators and the utilities can control them in the way that they like and maintain a relatively stable system,” explains Dr Townsend. “That’s not necessarily the most beneficial solution cost-wise to the end user because you have to send power from a long way away to where they actually consume it. So it’s better for consumers to have distributed solutions, such as their own solar panels, and produce power where it’s consumed — there are fewer electrical losses and less infrastructure required.
“We’ve had a power system that’s operated the same way for more than 100 years and the existing workforce know how to operate that system really well.”
Dr Chris Townsend
“However, you don’t want everyone to be an island. That’s not cost-efficient. It becomes electrically more difficult to have stability if there are potentially millions of distributed solar PVs out on the network. Ideally you want a system that is a combination of both (distributed and non-distributed power) where people can produce power and trade with people close to them. To do that requires highly functional networks and government entities that are willing to provide local infrastructure for people to share power.”
Another complication of an increasingly distributed network is the cost ‘death spiral’ that could arise from cheaper, better battery technology. Dr Townsend explains: “If people evaluate the cost of, say, solar and batteries and say look, it would actually be cheaper for me to produce and store my own power and disconnect from the grid, that will leave people connected to the grid who will now be part of a more expensive system. The more people disconnecting, the higher the costs of the grid. The higher the costs of the grid, the more people wanting to disconnect, and so on. So we really need to strike this balance where people can have their distributed assets but stay connected to the grid and trade energy in their street and suburb.”
Of course a utopian system would require no storage at all. There would simply be a seamless balance between electrical generation and load – supply and demand – achieved through precision scheduling and agility. But that might be a bridge too far for a system already grappling with monumental change, new energy sources coming on line and a stop-start electric vehicle movement.
Certainly, the State Government is not playing down the conflation of the challenges currently facing the sector. Its Energy Transformation Taskforce stated in August this year: “Unless we modernise the way the power system is regulated and managed, energy will not be dispatched at the least sustainable cost, the power system will be limited in its ability to accommodate growing levels of renewable generation and other new technologies (such as battery storage) while maintaining security and reliability, and signals for investment in the power system — at the right time and place — will be inadequate.”
Best keep powering on, then.
Read the full issue of the Summer 2023 edition of Uniview [Accessible PDF 15Mb].