In the face of extreme heat, increased bushfire risk and severe storms, Western Power is fortifying its network for summer and into the future.
With a warming climate and increasing instances of extreme weather, often alternating in quick succession between severe storms, heatwaves and bushfires, the pressures on Western Power’s electricity network have never been greater.
Coupled with changing energy-use patterns, greater draw from residences due to a push towards electrification of appliances at a household level, and an overall growing peak electricity demand during hot weather, networks throughout the world are reaching a perfect storm of conditions that are driving a need for innovation.
Western Power has an important role to play when it comes to managing the network it has now, as well as planning the energy grid of the future.
For several years, the utility has invested about $1 billion annually in key maintenance activities and network upgrades to address safety, reliability and environmental risks – and these summer preparedness works have an emphasis on increasingly extreme weather conditions.
Western Power Executive Manager Asset Operations, Zane Christmas, said that as the risk of heatwaves and bushfires increases, the organisation has taken steps to ensure the network is as prepared as possible for severe weather.
“This includes finalising current bushfire mitigation work, ongoing maintenance programs and investing in network infrastructure upgrades such as insulator replacements, distribution transformer upgrades, managing trees and vegetation and washing and applying silicone to insulators via helicopter,” he said.
“We also work closely with the Department of Fire and Emergency Services and local governments to ensure we can access outage locations easily – particularly during high fire weather conditions – and restore power quickly, provided it is safe to do so.
“This is increasingly important in the metropolitan area in particular, as while this is predominantly an issue for the hills and the regions, many metropolitan residential areas have infrastructure which traverses areas of fire-prone bush and parkland, and we take our responsibility to minimise the chances of our machinery or infrastructure causing a bushfire extremely seriously.”
This targeted resilience work is paying off. In January and February 2024, the network recorded six of its ten highest demand days in history, with multiple heatwaves and temperatures above 40 degrees putting massive pressure on the network.
Despite the huge growth in power demand, a comparison between two of the highest demand days – 26 December 2021 and 18 February 2024 – showed that in 2024 the utility experienced significantly fewer fuse overloads and no feeder trips, and therefore a greatly reduced number of outages.
A secure, renewable future
But with an energy network that was built for one-way, generator-to-household supply and more predictable weather conditions, the race is now on to understand how Western Power can continue to facilitate the transition to renewable generation, while managing an ageing network.
Western Power Executive Manager Energy Transition & Sustainability, Matt Cheney, said that while the changing climate and increasingly extreme weather conditions pose challenges for the current network, Western Australia’s sun and wind resources will continue to be a key element of Western Power’s strategy as it moves towards net zero.
“In the SWIS (South West Interconnected System), 40 per cent of households now have rooftop solar, contributing more than 2GW to a system with a peak demand of 4.3GW – five times the capacity of the largest coal-fired power station,” he said.
“Each month, about 3000 new rooftop solar systems and 500 batteries are added, with these systems supplying three-quarters of the state’s energy demand in September 2024 – setting a new record.”
Western Power’s distribution network is the platform for unlocking greater potential from customer distributed energy resources (DER), and it’s helping to address some of the big challenges of the energy transition.
As part of the State Government’s DER Roadmap, several actions are underway to refine policy, regulation, market mechanisms, technology, and organisational functionality – aimed at connecting and activating more customer-owned DER, such as solar panels, batteries, smart home appliances and electric vehicles (EVs), into the future.
The award-winning Project Symphony– a collaboration between Western Power, Synergy, AEMO, and Energy Policy WA – showed that engaging customers in a new energy market and aggregating passive DER into a virtual power plant can help manage network peaks and troughs, reduce outage risks, and create additional value for customers.
Larger-scale community assets can also play a role. As part of Project Symphony a community battery was installed at Harrisdale, which was able to prove that storage systems could help smooth fluctuations that can lead to system instability, and thereby avoid customer outages. Battery storage and EVs are another key piece of the long-term puzzle, providing the ability to store and release energy at the right time, rather than having to prevent assets from feeding into the grid and essentially ‘losing’ the energy that was captured.
Western Power said that it knows energy storage is essential to getting the most from its generation capacity, which is why it’s working to install more community batteries.
Going underground
According to Mr Christmas, another measure that will enable greater uptake of renewables while also building resilience on the network is undergrounding.
“Undergrounding enables us to get more network capacity than traditional poles and wires, which means more solar and EVs can be connected in residential communities while also keeping assets cooler in extreme temperatures and giving them greater protection in severe weather like high winds and thunderstorms,” he said.
“For rural and regional customers, greater adoption of stand-alone power systems is another way we’re embracing renewables and reducing the resilience challenges for customers currently serviced by long, remote feeder lines which are exposed to the elements, difficult to access and thus vulnerable to extended outages.
“There is no single way to manage the challenges faced by rapidly changing climate. Increasing the resilience of the existing Western Power network, enabling greater connection of residential, community, and large-scale renewable generation, and innovating our operations to become more future-focused all must work in cohesion for us to get the balance right for the community.”
