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The Rudd Government will seek bids in October from consortia interested in bidding for its $100 million large-scale ‘smart grid’ demonstration project, according to project manager Graeme Marshall of the federal environment department.

Smart grids, underpinned by smart meters, are designed to handle two-way flows of data and power.

Advocates say smart grids will pave the way for electricity customers to reap the full benefits of their capacity to also be small-scale generators (through technologies like cogeneration and solar PV) and from their ability to reduce power use at peak times.

Announced by Treasurer Wayne Swan in the May Budget, the project is currently the subject of a pre-deployment study that is due to be completed next month.

Marshall told a Melbourne seminar organised by the iGrid research collaboration that the project aimed to deliver “a truly commercial scale rollout – we don’t want this to be just another trial”.

Pilot projects carried out internationally and in Australia to date had suffered from being “partial” – for example, focusing only on smart meters, he said.

The Government expects to announce the winning bid early next year, Marshall said.

Race against the clock

Stuart White, director of the Institute of Sustainable Futures, told CE Daily work by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) that will specify how much network providers in each state can spend made it crucial to get the message across quickly that smart grids can deliver huge cost savings through avoided expenditure on network expansion.

In NSW alone, the AER’s April determinations paved the way for up to $16.4 billion to be spent over the next five years on transmission and distribution networks.

The cost of the CPRS “is actually swamped, it’s dwarfed” by the potential spend on network expansion, said White, whose institute is spearheading the iGrid collaboration.

“There is a multimillion dollar bill on the pavement that is not being picked up” if Australia misses the chance to use smart grids and unleash their potential to take full advantage of energy efficiency and load-shifting efforts by consumers and small-scale, local-level generation, he said.

“It’s partly fragmentation,” White said.

“You’ve got a whole lot of activity around the CPRS and then you’ve got separate, relatively more obscure policy work and regulatory work around the network expenditure.

“Those two worlds do not seem to intersect … and that in itself is pretty scary.”

The timetable for the AER determinations – Queensland and South Australia are the next cabs off the rank – meant there was a chance “to start to get some of this right, to start to join some of these dots”, he said.

In the U.S., the Obama Administration has appointed a national coordinator to develop smart grid standards, while the UK low carbon transition plan released yesterday (see related article) says the Government will later this year publish a “high-level vision for a future smart grid and subsequently a plan for delivering this”.

Source:  www.cedaily.com.au