Page 50 - Climate Control Magazine September 2018
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Australia is home to the biggest rooftop solar adopters per capita in the world.
AUSTRALIAN RENEWABLE ENERGY AGENCY (ARENA) CEO, IVOR FRISCHKNECHT, EXPLAINS THE REVOLUTION THAT IS TAKING PLACE IN THE ENERGY SECTOR.
Join the distributed energy revolution
And that is only increasing. Rooftop solar in- stallations hit a new record in the March quarter with a monthly average of 127MW installed, up 56 per cent from the same time last year. Rooftop solar installations are running at an annualised rate of more than 1300MW.
An estimated 1 GW of rooftop solar was in- stalled across Australia last year. For the first time, rooftop solar throughout Australia gen- erated over 1000 GWh in a month – December last year.
“UP TO 45 PER CENT OF ELECTRICITY WILL BE GENERATED BY CONSUMERS WITHIN 20 YEARS.” - IVOR FRISCHKNECHT.
The uptake of rooftop solar PV among com- mercial and industrial customers is also increas- ing apace with business volume recently out- stripping residential customer capacity.
At present, rooftop solar generation accounts for just over 3 per cent of our generation. By 2050, it is estimated up to 45 per cent of Australia’s elec- tricity will be generated from solar PV on roof- tops. According to AEMO’s forecasts, 25 to 40 per cent will be coming from rooftops by 2040.
A growing number of Australians are also adding home batteries.
In 2017, the number of residential battery sys- tems installed trebled from the previous year. Al- most 21,000 battery systems were installed in Australian homes in 2017.
These small scale assets would reduce the need for network infrastructure, and conse- quently cut our electricity bills. It could displace the need for grid scale power stations.
In a future where the customer side of the equation has a bigger role to play in delivering supply and managing demand, our current in- dustry-centric view of the system has to change.
Instead, we need to think about the energy system holistically – and that includes finding ways for household solar, batteries and appli- ances to be utilised for the benefit of the sys- tem as a whole. ✺
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ivor Frischknecht is CEO of Australia’s Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) which was established to accelerate the shift to an affordable and
reliable renewable energy future. ARENA’s core grant funding is covered in the ARENA Act 2011, which provides the agency with $2 billion to invest in renewable energy projects until 2022.
IF MILLIONS OF Australian households and businesses continue to invest in their own solar and battery systems, this vast array of small scale energy assets known as Distributed Energy Resources (DER) could create enormous disrup- tion to the electricity system.
While this creates opportunities for con- sumers, it also creates challenges for incum- bents – the market, its operator, regulator, generators, retailers and networks. If utilised to our collective advantage, DER could make the system more resilient and affordable, but it could also make the system more unstable and expensive.
With forecasts that up to 45 per cent of our electricity will be generated by consumers with- in two decades, DER is set to transform our en- ergy system... for better or worse.
A revolution is underway in the energy sector. The transformation is not just happening at
grid scale, but also on the “customer side of the meter” in households and businesses. In the decades to come, it is increasingly clear that as well as being renewable, the future of Austral- ia’s energy generation is going to be small-scale and highly distributed.
While much of our current energy debate is fo- cused on the transition of grid scale generation from coal to wind and solar farms stretching across the countryside, and on grid scale storage like big batteries and pumped hydro, Australian households and businesses have been busily changing the way they use energy.
Ten years ago, there were just 14,000 rooftop solar units across Australia.
Today, 1.8 million Australian households have solar panels on their roofs. In the last decade, Australians have embraced rooftop solar so en- thusiastically that we are now the biggest roof- top solar adopters per capita in the world.
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