“It’s a joke”: Bill shock and red tape pushes industrial company off the grid

It was going to cost Western Australian business Instant Products $117,000 to connect a single phase, 63 amp power line to a big new building site in a small town north of Perth.

When managing director Scott Rawson read that quote, he snapped. 

That sum didn’t include the $3,000 he’d already paid for the quote nor the “hundreds of thousands” they’d need to pay to upgrade the connection to the between 120-160 amps needed for the industrial site. After going through eight years of shire, state and federal permitting and environmental processes, enough, Rawson felt, was enough. 

“I turned around and thought this is completely pointless, I’m not going to line their [grid operator Western Power’s] pockets with that amount of money, I’m going to stay off grid,” he told Renew Economy.

Instead of connecting to the grid, the company will now install solar both on the ground and on the warehouse rooftops and install a battery – all sizes are yet to be determined – to run the whole site off grid. 

Rawson says the company bought the 97 hectare site in Muchea years ago after outgrowing its original five acre site in an industrial park in Wangara slightly to the south. 

Not a snap judgement

But starting out off grid wasn’t a random, snap judgement. 

Rawson’s company makes portable toilets, shipping containers, and portable offices, and in its client mix counts a company that makes batteries. 

Furthermore, it had already outfitted the Wangara HQ with solar lights after becoming similarly irritated with the time required to upgrade a grid connection there. 

“We had applied for the power upgrade [at Wangara]. It was a two year process, very expensive at about $100,000, and we’re in an industrial area there already, so it was a joke,” Rawson says. 

“We were getting nowhere. We’d paid all the money and I had to write to the minister’s office to magically get our power upgrade, two months after.

“So I started thinking about solar lighting, and it’s been a monumental success … it reinforced to me why we would not connect to the grid.”

The solar lighting is by Green Frog Systems which makes lights backed by solar and small, long duration batteries.

The battery customer is Battery Energy, which makes containerised batteries and counts Telstra and the Department of Defence among its own clientele.

“The roof will give us enough surface area for the solar, so the key for us will be the battery storage,” Rawson says. 

“Having them as clients and seeing what they’re doing, having designed and built that sort of stuff, I thought there is absolutely no need to be on grid.”

Eyewatering costs

But while Rawson’s journey to building an entirely off-grid industrial site came partly through bill shock, he says the up-front costs are also eyewatering – albeit with a payoff from having no bills. 

“At Wangara our yards are lit 24 hours a day and we’ve got no other bills,” he says.

“But it’s a big capital outlay and what incentives are we getting? We may get a grant if we’re lucky, but it’s not like residential customers who are getting rebates, we get nothing.

“You have all these factory roofs [which could be converted to solar] yet it has to come out of our own pockets.”

The commercial and industrial sector has been in the sights of solar and battery advocates for years, but the size of the capital cost, the structural issues that can come with retrofitting, and grid connection challenges that come with adding a potentially multi-megawatt load to a site make the challenge more difficult. 

It’s a problem that many advocates for clean energy say could be solved by creating a targeted version of the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme. 

A Clean Energy Council proposal suggested it could apply to a minimum solar installation, and any business that installed more would earn certificates that they can sell to businesses who can’t install this amount.