Australia - Smart Grid, Smart City - Key findings, recommendations and comments

Synopsis

The Smart Grid, Smart City (SGSC) project, which ran from 2010 to 2013 in Newcastle and Sydney CBD areas, was funded by a $100 million injection from the federal government and around $390 million ‘in kind’ or otherwise by the project’s other contributors, which included entities such as Ausgrid, Energy Australia, IBM Australia, the CSIRO and several local councils.

Key objectives of the project:

Part of the recommendation was that the broader industry should be involved and that the outcomes would be shared.

The project was launched in 2010 and is perhaps the most comprehensive smart grid demonstration project undertaken anywhere in the world. The report, published in mid-2014, presents three very detailed smart grid scenarios towards the year 2034.

It trialled a range of in-grid and consumer-based smart technologies with electricity suppliers for 17,000 households in order to determine whether there was an economic benefit attached to deploying the technologies across Australia.

The overarching outcome of the project is that under a medium scenario smart grids can deliver a national net benefit of $27 billion by 2034 through the development and deployment of smart grid technologies; changing consumer behaviour; energy market reform; and ‘cost reflective’ electricity pricing such as dynamic tariffs.

The findings of the trial were presented in July 2014

Key technologies: Active Voltage & Power Factor Correction; Active Volt-VAr Control (AVVC);3 Distributed Storage; Fault Detection, Isolation & Restoration (FDIR); Electric Vehicle, Substation & Feeder Monitoring; Wide Area Measurement (WAM); Distributed Generation; ICT; NBN; Photovoltaic Systems; Small Wind Turbines; Solid Oxide Fuel Cells; Zinc Bromide Batteries; Smart Meters; Smart Meter Infrastructure; Dynamic Tariffs.