Insight
Transforming the world’s most complex ‘machines’
Electric power systems are ultra complex ‘socio-techno-economic’ systems. They are foundational to human life, wellbeing and economic activity in a modern society.
They are also increasingly critical to an expanding range of other sectors including water, transport and communications.
Power systems were already among the largest and most complex ‘machines’ created in the 20th century. Over the next decade, they will be fundamentally transformed to enable a secure and cost-efficient future powered by renewable energy.
For example, Australia’s GW-scale power systems are experiencing one of the world’s fastest grid transformations. This is impacting all vertical layers of the system including bulk power, transmission, distribution and energy retail. Most importantly, customers are both actively participating in and directly impacted by these profound transformational shifts.
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Like many grid transformations, Australia’s is characterised by the progressive withdrawal of the dispatchable synchronous generation fleet and the mass-deployment of Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) generation, both utility-scale wind and solar and world-leading levels of rooftop solar photovoltaics. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has highlighted that by 2025, the National Electricity Market (NEM) is projected to have sufficient renewable resource potential to completely serve demand during certain time windows.
Looking out further to 2050, when compared with the already world-leading levels of today, AEMO’s widely accepted Step Change scenario anticipates that the NEM will need to accommodate VRE and DER/CER at multipliers of 9x and 5x respectively! This represents a transition from a past of a few hundred transmission-connected generators to a future involving tens of millions of highly diverse resources participating across several vertical layers of the power system.
Achieving this is one of the most complex challenges ever faced by humanity.
