At 1.30pm on August 30, Australia’s energy grid took a breather as it supplied a record winter low.
This was, at least in part, because at that moment rooftop solar met 54 per cent of underlying demand in the National Electricity Market (NEM), and a staggering 99.9 per cent of demand for all of South Australia.
Six days earlier, SA Power Networks also ran its annual curtailment drill, in which it remotely instructed the solar systems of around 100,000 customers to wind their output down to zero, to ensure it could still control these systems from afar.
Spoiler alert, it could.
Both of these situations demonstrate positive progress being made towards the energy transition, and were rightfully lauded in media.
But what wasn’t mentioned in the accompanying news stories is that they also highlight a growing level of complexity characterising our energy system.
A grid with that little left to do is the hardest kind to hold steady.
Frequency control, voltage support, inertia and system strength have traditionally been provided mostly by synchronous generators. As rooftop solar pushes demand from the grid lower and the generation mix changes, more of that work needs to be done by batteries, grid-forming inverters, and synchronous condensers. At the same time, millions of distributed energy resources increasingly need to be coordinated.
Solar keeps ramping up alongside wind, batteries, and electric vehicles, while around 15 gigawatts of coal and gas generation is scheduled to retire over the coming decade.
Add to this estimates that Data Centre loads will rise to 13 per cent of the NEM by 2035-36, and one thing is clear.
The stability of our energy system will depend on coordinating and securing an increasingly complex and dynamic network that now includes a growing number of privately owned and operated devices.
So as we continue to funnel billions of dollars into renewable energy projects, transmission lines, and battery installations, we must not risk overlooking a more fundamental challenge: managing complexity.
Which is where two decades of Australian investment in quantum could start to pay off.
A question of numbers
Ensuring the security and coordination of the energy transition involves extraordinarily complex calculations with vast numbers of variables and constraints.
How do we balance fluctuating solar and wind generation with changing demand patterns? How do we coordinate the charging of millions of electric vehicles without overwhelming the grid?
How do we determine the most efficient use of batteries, transmission infrastructure, and industrial demand? How do we minimise congestion, reduce losses and maintain reliability while costs remain under pressure?
As these systems grow in scale, some of these optimisation problems become extraordinarily demanding even for the best classical computers.
This is why French energy giant EDF is investigating quantum approaches to EV smart-charging, including running an experimental forecasting and optimisation use case on a 100-plus-qubit neutral-atom system.
In a similar vein, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and IonQ have been investigating quantum approaches to power grid optimisation and generation scheduling.
On home shores, we are also seeing quantum computing being used to tackle one of the most difficult aspects of decarbonisation: discovering better materials.
This is because quantum computing offers the prospect of dramatically accelerating the search for the next generation of battery materials, catalysts, and industrial processes.
So in May, Australian quantum company Q-CTRL reported running a materials physics simulation on 120 qubits of IBM quantum hardware, completing in two minutes a calculation that took its classical benchmark over 100 hours.
Q-CTRL reported a 3,000-fold speedup, modelling how electrons in materials give rise to properties relevant to energy transmission, storage and generation, and described the result as evidence of practical quantum advantage.
Earlier this year, CSIRO, RMIT University, and the University of Melbourne also demonstrated the first quantum battery to complete a full charge-discharge cycle.
The experimental device held its charge for a million times longer than it took to charge, and exhibited super-extensive behaviour by charging faster as it got larger, which is the reverse of how a conventional battery behaves.
While these projects may be early-stage or pilots, they are still a sign of what’s to come for the industry.
But energy companies do not need to wait for fully fault-tolerant quantum computers to arrive before they can benefit from quantum innovation.
A question of precision
The energy industry is building ever more transmission, storage, geothermal, hydrogen, and carbon-management infrastructure.
In this environment, it is enormously valuable to precisely see what is happening underground, around critical assets, and across increasingly complex systems.
This is where quantum sensors come in with their unique ability to measure gravity, magnetic fields, time, and motion with extraordinary precision.
And, again, we already have homegrown capability.
Melbourne-based Nomad Atomics has developed a field-deployable quantum gravimeter capable of detecting minute variations in gravity caused by changes in mass beneath the surface, and is applying the technology to mineral exploration and underground monitoring, with emerging applications including groundwater and carbon-storage monitoring.
Phasor Innovation is developing diamond-based quantum magnetometers capable of making highly precise measurements of magnetic fields, with potential applications spanning navigation and geophysics.
Together with Q-CTRL, Nomad Atomics and Phasor are three Australian companies backed by Defence to develop new sensing and navigation technologies for environments where GPS is unavailable, in another sign that quantum sensors are moving out of the laboratory and into demanding real-world environments.
So as Australia expands and modernises its energy infrastructure, quantum is beginning to offer a growing toolkit of new ways to optimise complex systems, discover better materials, and see things we could not see before.
Whether the energy industry chooses to pick up these tools could be what determines the speed and success of the transition.
Petra Andrén is the chief executive officer of Quantum Australia
