Medium-sized renewable microgrids are being held back by a lack of policy clarity and standardised connection procedures, which are making it more difficult for remote First Nations communities to enjoy the kind of energy security as other Australians.
The market operator and utilities have invested heavily in standardisation to ramp up the number of connections they can let onto the grid each year.
But these rules are still considered to be too onerous for 5-40 megawatt (MW) projects that might provide secure power to small remote communities, says Ekistica engineer Josiah Fajardo.
“That creates a very particular problem for community-based projects that are on the smaller scale,” Fajardo said at the First Nations Clean Energy Symposium last week.
“There’s just that barrier of getting through all those hurdles that we’ve put in place for good reason to ensure that new systems won’t negatively impact the network.
“If we were to take a similar approach for that missing middle piece… What are the biggest levers that we could push so that they can actually connect in a streamlined way? I think there’s opportunity there to do that.”
Fajardo says that opportunity is in creating standardised processes for smaller projects, much as has been done for the 100 MW-plus ones, to get these projects online.
While First Nations groups are trying to push through small-scale projects to support remote communities, the first movers have had to do considerable extra work to convince utilities that it would be possible.
Original Power’s 100 kilowatt (kW) solar system and 136 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery Marlinja microgrid in the Northern Territory took five years to get done.
It took three years to figure out how to hack pre-paid meters to allow two-way revenue flows, and a lack of processes for grid connection assessments meant uncertain timelines and problems around locking in financing.
Original Power is building on what it, and the Northern Territory utilities, have learned in Marlinja for the next project at Borroloola, the Ngardara 2.1 MW solar and 1.8 MW, 6.6 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery.
The issue is that remote power providers don’t want to have to manage hundreds of small power systems across their vast networks, Fajardo says.
“They have a desire for standardisation. Keep things simple, don’t complicate things because we are already overstretched, underresourced, and trying to manage many many different systems at the same time,” he said.
“So don’t come to us with your grid forming, diesel off innovative hybrid ways of operating. We like our diesel power stations because we know how they operate, and we’ve been using them for decades.”
The financing issue for small-scale remote projects is real and was recognised by the federal government last week, when it announced a $10 million fund to get two to construction stage.
But funding is a symptom of the problem, rather than the cause, says First Nations Clean Energy Network cleantech specialist Madison Sturgess.
“I don’t actually think the problem is [that] it’s too expensive to do community energy,” she said at the symposium last week.
“We haven’t enabled the regulatory commercial conditions to allow that to succeed in the way that we’ve done it for other segments of the energy market, and technology and commercial settings as well.
“We’re leaving a lot of community value on the table by not doing that.”
Under the current systems and connection processes, a 5 MW project quickly becomes complex and expensive, even though it’s not that big.
But it’s still worthwhile as a community-building piece of infrastructure, Sturgess says.
“Rooftop solar is really easy because we’ve done the work to establish the processes to make it easy. We haven’t done that for community or distribution level energy,” she says.
“Community energy also has the opportunity to modernise and stabilise your local network, which means there’s additional services that a battery can actually offer that that distribution network.
“A community fund could actually be generated from the revenue beyond just displacing your own household use.
“There’s a community wealth building piece there as well, and a revitalisation piece there as well that I think gets missed.”
