Written by Madison Sturgess, Microgrids Project Officer.
Twin villages, at the end of a peninsular, on a tiny island in the Caribbean, is the last place on Earth you’d expect to find cutting edge energy networks.
For three years I worked with a small team to build two community-sized, solar + battery, smart microgrids in rural Haiti. By the end of those three years, we’d successfully collaborated with the government to draft market enabling regulation, attracting investment to build another 22 microgrids across the country over the next five years.
Image courtesy of EarthSpark International. 100kW microgrid system with solar + batteries + diesel back up. Servicing 500 households in Tiburon, Haiti.
Despite being an underdeveloped nation where incumbent infrastructure and regulation is limited, Haiti is about to leapfrog to first class smart grids. Regional communities are early adopters of flexible grid energy services that are reliable, affordable, and clean powered through the support of new utilities, like EarthSpark International, who are betting on smart self-healing microgrids to unlock economic, energy, and environmental resilience in communities across the developing world.
With access to affordable, reliable, and clean electricity a pressing challenge that is not unique to underdeveloped communities, there is much to learn from this high-flying country for our own.
Rising energy prices, aging infrastructure, grid defections, rapid technology change, and a growing appetite for decarbonisation are definitive challenges for Australia’s grid networks for more than a decade. Consequently, access to energy is changing in Australia at a time when it sits at the nexus of almost everything we do.
Get smart
As our grid ages, smart and clean-powered energy innovations have exploded across the market, creating a whole new toolbox of powerful energy resources oriented around the consumer called distributive energy resources (DERs). These tools are getting smarter and more efficient by the minute and the National Energy Market (NEM) is struggling to keep up!
Tools in the DER toolbox.
As the costs of these innovations fall, consumers are becoming more empowered to adopt technology that is customised to their energy needs. The abundance of rooftop solar and other DERs reveal how the rigidity of incumbent infrastructure and regulation overwhelm our centralised, one-way energy flowing national grid.
The demand and the tools clearly exist to modernise the national grid; from centralised to distributive energy networks, from one way to two-way flows of energy, and from passive to active participation by the consumer. The grid of the future is the smart grid.
The above infographic is an adaptation of the original which can be found in Energy Atlas: Facts and figures about renewables in Europe, 2018; page 33. (https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/energyatlas2018_facts-and-figures-renewables-europe.pdf.pdf?dimension1=ds_energieatlas)
In real time a smart grid can:
- improve fault detection, local asset utilisation, and other inefficiencies via digital monitoring;
- self-heal using quick response optimisation tools;
- flexibly distribute and transmit energy when needed;
- accommodate highly variable energy inputs using demand response and other load controls; and
- enable new and diverse market participation.
Utilities can build resiliency into the grid if they proactively plan, rather than fashion temporary work arounds, for the integration of DERs. From demand management to microgrids, smart grid tech can bolster much needed flexibility and reliability for consumers and network operators.
Simply put, Australian grids need to get smart.
Back to the future
What exactly is a microgrid? A microgrid is an energy network that generates and distributes electricity within its own geographical footprint.
Microgrids can:
- blend batteries, solar, smart meters, load control, and other DERs to form a self-contained system;
- run on renewable and non-renewable sources;
- connect to and disconnect from the central grid on demand; and
- enable energy sharing and trading with local and national energy markets.
Microgrids are flexible smart grid infrastructure that can blend technologies to the owner’s needs, benefiting the grid user and other grids and markets.
Microgrids are flexible smart grid infrastructure that can blend technologies to the owner’s needs, benefiting the grid user and other grids and markets.
Microgrids are not a new concept. Australia’s Snowy Hydro-electric Scheme was the first energy network to connect self-contained regional power grids to a central state network. Those self-contained grids were, in effect, microgrids. So why are we going back to the future to resolve modern energy challenges?
The Information Age has exponentially energised diverse and powerful functionality of whole industries, including the energy industry. Technology like smart-enabled microgrids can harmonise that functionality into standalone or interconnected systems.
As communities from Haiti to Australia navigate an energy transition, microgrids are increasingly viewed as a pivotal tool to improve the flexibility, affordability, reliability, and sustainability of energy networks.
Globally, a surge of military bases, hospitals, universities, data centres, local councils, and farmers are developing microgrids and other smart grid infrastructure, to improve their energy security. For many there are still concerns about the scalability of microgrids and whether they can be adapted to existing grid connected customers.
The price of battery storage, for example, remains cost prohibitive for some. Despite enduring questions about reliability, dispatchability of renewables, design complexity, and the cyber security of cloud enabled grids, the smart tech market continues to mature rapidly. Thanks to predictive AI, real time capabilities, quick response controls, and appropriate system sizing most concerns are easily allayed. You can read more about misconceptions around microgrids, here.
While consumers face continued uncertainty around electricity tariffs, energy bills continue to increase and power quality falls. With the delayed transition to smart grids, there will be more grid defections, investment in diesel redundancies, abandoned assets, inequitable grid access, and the quickening march of the Death Spiral.
Perhaps the value of a microgrid is better understood when consumers consider, what is the cost of an aging, unreliable, and unaffordable grid?
Back to the farm
Energy has always been essential for the provision of our most basic needs. Unsuitable grid infrastructure and regulation, like unstable electricity access and broad stroke tariffs, directly impact farmers’ practises and yield.
Deploying smart grid technology to farmers has the potential to benefit the farm as well as surrounding communities and industries. By locally resolving energy demand first, via a microgrid or other smart grid tech, regional communities can reduce their burden on the central grid and generate local energy resilience.
Integrating smart grid technology means that farmers may be able to share power with nearby farms and other grid consumers. Ultimately, they would be able to manage supply and demand locally, exporting power from the system when there is a surplus, and importing during higher demand events.
The transition is not without its challenges. In Haiti, poverty, low telecommunication connectivity, and government corruption undermined progress. In my return to Australia, the scale of barriers doesn’t feel too dissimilar. Patchy internet connectivity, seasonal and commodity dependent energy needs, and a dearth of energy data insights are just a few barriers to solving smart energy access on Australian farms.
The Queensland Farmers’ Federation and its project partners hope this microgrid project will produce valuable energy data to help reduce barriers and reveal meaningful insights for farmers seeking reliable, affordable, and sustainable access to energy.