Sydney has the means to become a kind of city-state of energy by taking ownership of its electricity use and production as one big renewable energy zone, a think tank is suggesting.
Embracing the idea – and its untapped rooftop solar potential – would make Sydney the first city in Australia to shift the focus from extracting power from regional areas to producing and using what it needs ‘on site’.
It would also resolve a major complaint that Australia’s regional cities and towns are doing all the heavy lifting on renewables, while the cities reap the benefits.
The Sydney as a Renewable Energy Zone report says Sydney accounts for almost half of the total energy demand in the state.
If every residential, commercial and industrial rooftop in metropolitan Sydney was covered in solar panels the city could generate 21 megawatts (MW) of electricity, or up to 75 per cent of the city’s needs, the report found.
And while households might only be able to cover their own use, industrial warehouse rooftops can generate more than 500 per cent of the electricity they need to operate.
In the report, the think tank Committee for Sydney spun up a utopian vision of an almost-self-contained energy city that pairs rooftop solar with home, community, mid-sized industrial and grid-scale batteries, orchestrates these within virtual power plants (VPPs) that make use of the city’s two existing energy distribution networks.
All of which would be collaboratively run and shared “by all”.
Ausgrid Warriewood Community Battery Image: Ausgrid
“Cities are at the forefront of delivering the energy transition,” said consulting firm Arup’s Kate West.
“As we electrify more of our systems, coordinating action will be critical to maximise both the potential and the cost savings for consumers.”
But only a third of Sydney residents have solar installed on their homes, leaving millions still locked out of the benefits, said Sam Kernaghan, a director at Committee for Sydney.
“There was a time when not every home had a television, just think about the benefits in the near future, if everyone could have access to affordable rooftop solar and storage,” he said in a statement.
“This scale of transition requires leadership and collaboration between multiple levels of government, regulatory bodies and industry, along with physical and digital assets working in tandem, including smart meters, virtual power plants and coordination platforms in an environment of rapidly evolving technologies.”
City councils and smaller cities have been quietly trying to take control of their own energy needs for some time, with a Renew Economy report in 2014 outlining what some local governments were doing even then to secure their energy needs, albeit relying on building or contracting energy from big renewables projects.
And it’s not the first time New South Wales (NSW) in particular has been exhorted to make use of commercial and industrial rooftops to offset failing and shuttering coal fired power plants, with one consultant saying it should look there to offset energy losses from stuttering Eraring.
But it is a major step for a city to look at the resources available inside its own walls for the means of generation.
Serious future planning needed
Turning Sydney into a more self-sufficient energy hub would require the city to supercharge state policies already in place to retrofit apartment buildings with rooftop solar and electric vehicle chargers.
The report recommends looking at how Illawarra’s urban renewable energy zone (REZ), flagged in May, operates as a possible option for Sydney to embrace.
That REZ will use new network software and equipment to see how to combine consumer energy resources (CER), community batteries, EVs and industry needs.
But with a majority of Sydneysiders still not connected to any CER, any job to take control of the city’s energy requirements means bringing those people along on the journey.
The Committee for Sydney repeated a familiar refrain in its report that the best options for renters and low-income households are community batteries and VPPs open to people with no assets to contribute, and mandatory minimum energy standards for rental properties.
It also recommends new models to bring apartments into the mix, saying new models could include industrial rooftop owners sharing electricity with apartments nearby.
The report suggested a community-ownership model for community batteries – a method that was the original idea behind community batteries but which was quickly sidelined when DNSPs entered the field.
And it suggested ideas such as creating a sub-district-level local energy zone linked to the reach and capacity of the nearest substation, and incentives like the SRES or a hyper-local capacity investment scheme to encourage businesses to install over-sized solar and battery systems and do so more more quickly.
