Where’s Evo? The missing network in Canberra’s bold electrification experiment

Canberra is about to host one of Australia’s most ambitious experiments in household electrification. But the company with perhaps the most to learn from it, the city’s electricity and gas network operator, won’t be an embedded partner.

Evoenergy was invited to formally participate in the ARENA-funded Go Electric Canberra project during its early development, but declined.

Instead, it will cooperate with the project from the sidelines, sharing network information and handling the connections for up to 1,000 homes in Banks and surrounding suburbs as they replace their gas appliances and petrol cars with electric alternatives.

Jon Sibley, director of enX Consulting, who helped develop the project, says that won’t stop the project succeeding. 

Whilst he admits “it will be great to have Evoenergy’s involvement in the project to help streamline processes such as three-phase upgrades, solar and battery connections, and vehicle-to-grid.”

But whether Evoenergy itself is missing an opportunity is another question.

The $32 million project, backed by $8.2 million from ARENA, will provide households with a one-stop shop to coordinate advice, finance, appliances and installers. It will also install around 200 vehicle-to-grid chargers, making it a valuable laboratory for understanding what mass electrification does to the local grid.

Sibley says the project is “bigger than Canberra”, and will generate knowledge that can be used elsewhere, including how electrification can be managed without unnecessarily expanding electricity networks.

Canberra’s cold winters make that particularly important. The project will investigate how the increased winter peak created by electrification can be mitigated, using batteries, smart controls and other forms of flexible demand.

That’s where Evoenergy’s absence becomes more conspicuous.

If the network were embedded in the project, it could potentially help combine project data from 1,000 households with its own network information to produce aggregated analysis showing the impacts of electrification at street or feeder level.

Sibley says it will provide “an unprecedented pool of evidence to inform future utility and government planning on how place-based electrification can be delivered efficiently and affordably.”

Evoenergy’s role contrasts with the role of the network in another ARENA-funded experiment, Electrify 2515 in the Illawarra.

There, Endeavour Energy is a formal project partner and has turned the experiment into a real-world laboratory for its own network, combining household and network data to understand when, and how, newly electrified homes actually use electricity.

Endeavour’s Colin Crisafulli told Renew Economy earlier this year that the results so far from Electrify 2515 were challenging assumptions that widespread electrification would require enormous amounts of new grid infrastructure.

“None of those behaviours at this point are leading us to a concern that the grid can’t handle it,” Crisafulli said.

The bigger challenge, he said, was working out “how do we double what the grid can do without necessarily doubling the size of the grid.”

Evoenergy maintains it can get much of the information it needs without being embedded in Go Electric.

In a statement to Renew Economy it says it already has smart-meter, network-model and operational data, but acknowledges that “behind-the-meter project data may offer useful additional insights,” and says it would welcome project information that “could complement our existing data.”

Go Electric’s 200 V2G installations could make that particularly interesting.

“The scale of the V2G component offers an opportunity to learn more about those impacts, including how coordinated charging and discharging could support the local network,” Evoenergy says.

It says it’s supportive of the project and “will share relevant network information and insights to support positive outcomes for customers, the project and the broader ACT energy transition.”

There are possible explanations why Evoenergy has chosen not to become an official partner of the Go Electric project.

One is competing demands on Evoenergy’s staff and resources. The distributor is currently developing the ACT’s solar emergency backstop, a major new system designed to allow rooftop solar to be remotely curtailed as a last resort when extremely low grid demand threatens system security.

Ironically, Evoenergy is developing this capability at precisely the time Go Electric is creating a real-world experiment in how solar, batteries, EVs, V2G and flexible electric loads interact with its network, and how they could potentially be managed more intelligently.

Unlike Endeavour Energy, Evoenergy is also Canberra’s gas distributor, and is owned 50 per cent by ACT government-owned Icon Water and 50 per cent by Jemena, one of Australia’s largest gas infrastructure companies.

As Canberra electrifies, it therefore faces the unusual task of having to accommodate rapidly increasing demand on one of its networks, while managing declining demand on another.

Evoenergy strongly denies its gas interests played any part in its decision not to become an embedded Go Electric partner. It says it supports the ACT government’s net-zero-by-2045 target and is planning for the eventual wind-down and decommissioning of the gas network.

Which makes Go Electric potentially valuable to the gas side of Evoenergy’s business too.

Sibley says networks will eventually have to actively retire parts of their gas systems as falling customer numbers make them uneconomic.

He hopes the project will demonstrate how, when whole neighbourhoods are involved, sections of the gas network could eventually be retired, initially street by street, and ultimately at district level.

That could reduce the cost of maintaining an increasingly under-utilised gas network for both customers and the utility.

Sibley says Go Electric offers Evoenergy an opportunity to begin learning how that might work, including the community engagement and social-equity issues likely to be crucial to retiring gas infrastructure.

Canberra already sources the equivalent of 100 per cent of its electricity consumption from renewable generation sources, it has the highest uptake of EVs in the country, and has stopped new fossil-gas connections to most new buildings.

Now it is about to conduct a suburb-scale experiment in what comes next: homes leaving gas, EVs becoming grid resources, and household demand becoming flexible enough to potentially avoid expensive network upgrades.

Evoenergy will be watching closely.

It just won’t be inside the experiment.