Identifying and Removing Barriers for Electricity System Planning

Project Lead: Sean Elphick, University of Wollongong
Project Partners: Endeavour Energy

Project Overview

The residential fossil fuel supply industry is generally separate from the electrical energy supply.  Historically, both industries have not shared data on energy use at a granular level – because they didn’t need to. With the advent of transition to electrification, this dynamic will change. 

This project develops access to residential mixed fuel use to enable more granular forecasting of demand when transitioning away from fossil fuels to electrification. 

As the electricity market rapidly decarbonises, the fastest way that homes, businesses and industries can reduce their emissions is through electrification – transitioning the primary energy source from liquid fuels and gas to electricity. However, this transition presents significant challenges for electricity network service providers (NSPs) with respect to uncertainty related to planning (capacity sizing) of future electricity supply networks to meet the needs of full electrification because information related to liquid fuel and gas energy consumption is not readily available to them.  

Project Objectives and Deliverables

This project will undertake preliminary studies aimed at developing an understanding of the capacity impacts of full electrification on electricity supply networks and will identify opportunities in regulatory frameworks to mandate that energy consumption across all fuel types is available to NSPs to assist in electrification. 

Objective: to improve the forecasting and planning of electrification for both NSPs and market bodies through process improvement and provision of essential primary fuel use information. At present, information related to gas and liquid fuel energy consumption is not readily available to electricity NSPs despite the inevitable goal of transitioning the vast majority energy onto the electricity system.  

Deliverables will include progress reports, a final detailed report and knowledge sharing sessions covering:  

1. Interviews, targeting electricity networks and AEMO, to understand present usage information and how they distinguish and account for diverse primary fuel uses (e.g. gas vs all electric neighbourhoods)  

1. A review of public and commercial data sets that could be used for assessment of total energy demand, identifying additional sources useful for network planning functions. 

Identification of key opportunities to improve present planning processes (including, as an expectation, provision of data between electrical and gas NSPs) 

Impacts to Net Zero Targets

This project has strong alignment with the mission of the NSW Decarbonisation Innovation Hub. Specifically, this project supports the mission of the Electrification and Energy Systems Network to accelerate renewable energy solutions and support the uptake of electrification in other sectors. The project also aligns with the broader mission of the Decarbonisation Innovation Hub to foster collaboration between researchers and industry to drive decarbonisation. 

This project is designed to assist with ensuring that electricity supply networks are sufficiently informed to meet the requirements that will be placed on them as the transition to full electrification takes place. Electricity supply networks are a critical component of the transition to both electrification and the continuing integration of clean energy technologies and clean transport (electric vehicle) technologies, and as such are a key component in supporting the NSW Government’s goal of adoption of decarbonised technologies and services to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050 and provide economic benefit to NSW. Properly designed and operated electricity supply networks are essential to a number of the sector decarbonisation innovation opportunities identified in the NSW Decarbonisation Innovation 2023 Study, specifically energy, transport and industry. The study notes that in addition to continued integration of clean electricity generation “Electrification of other sectors such as industrial processes, road transport and agriculture operation present opportunities to directly reduce emissions with renewable electricity”.