Client: Energy Networks Australia (ENA)
The Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap is a collaborative project between ENA and Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. It sets out the actions necessary to prepare the grid such that it is fit for purpose in ten years’ time, countering future challenges such as:
- Increased distributed energy resources (DER)
- Greater levels of renewable generation
- Bidirectional power flow
As part of this, EA Technology was commissioned to develop the future operating platform for the grid under four future scenarios.
We recommended an SGAM approach to Energy Networks Australia such that the key actions and relationships could be visualised at all levels, from component through to business layers. This approach was welcomed and hence we created a high-level SGAM for each of the future world scenarios.
For each scenario, we considered:
- The key actors
- How they would interact with each other
- The extent to which the role of such actors will change from today
- The prevalence of roles and interactions across all 4 scenarios
Through these considerations, it was possible to establish a least regrets pathway for the next ten years.
The key benefits of this approach were the ability to demonstrate in a highly visual manner the changes that would be necessary to facilitate one of the four future worlds in comparison to today’s electricity system. By understanding the key interactions across all four scenarios, areas of commonality were drawn out, thus providing a pathway of least regrets for the initial period, until such time as the scenarios diverge due to specific trigger points.
The work resulted in the publication of two reports that support Phase 2 of the Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap. These reports eventually contributed to the creation of the final Roadmap which now forms a key part of Australia’s strategy for successfully transitioning towards future networks – A lower emission, lower cost and higher security energy future.
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