As large-scale solar, wind and battery projects change the way electricity is generated and stored, households have quietly scored a recent victory with the Cheaper Home Batteries Program delivering 10.7 GWh of storage to the grid.
Australia’s years spent solving the supply side of the energy transition have finally paid off at a time when the world is facing a global oil crisis that is accelerating the pace of electrification.
This is reflected in how quickly Australian consumers are turning their attention to electrification. Nearly 16,000 electric vehicles were sold in Australia in March, rising to one in six vehicles sold in April that were fully electric. As more households adopt electric vehicles, install home batteries or reduce their dependence on gas appliances, predictable and stable electricity demand profiles are becoming increasingly dynamic with a shift towards more concentrated demand.
The same pattern is only now beginning to emerge in commercial and industrial companies. Companies facing the shock of rising diesel and fuel costs will accelerate investments in transportation fleet electrification and charging infrastructure, energy storage and industrial electrification to reduce their exposure to the global fuel market. While the demand for electricity among existing energy consumers is growing, the planned data centers are putting increasing pressure on the electricity grid.
While the global oil crisis has increased demand, Australia’s electricity grids are not designed to support the simultaneous growth of electric vehicle charging, consumer energy sources and always-on data center loads.
Data to support investment decisions in high-voltage networks and greater visibility of low-voltage networks are both critical if DNSPs want to support the growth of electrification. In many cases, DNSPs do not have full visibility or the ability 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 issues that energy consumers will ultimately have to pay for. But this need not 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 has spent decades solving for generation capacity and should look to invest in transmission, distribution and visibility of the grid edge as electrification increases. Rather than risk overbuilding grid infrastructure in some locations while underinvesting in others, the era of electrification will ultimately be defined less by the amount of renewable energy capacity Australia delivers, and 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
