National Electricity Market gives Green Light to Renewables. by Michael Gunter Massive changes have been underway in the Victorian electricity industry in recent times. The strong privatisation push is associated with the Kennett Government. This was however preceded by significant corporatisation reforms under previous state Labor Governments. If you thought that we had arrived at a new status quo, then think again. The process of setting up a "national grid" in the Eastern States has been underway for about 4 years and is now gathering pace. The proposed market structure is being defined and refined by policy developers from State and Federal jurisdictions. They are each represented on the National Grid Management Council (NGMC), the engine for creating the national electricity market. The market rules or "Code", although still the subject of hot dispute by the different sectors of the industry, have been refined by an extensive industry consultation process to the point where the market will soon be open for business, albeit in a transitional mode. It is envisaged that the participants will just have to "suck it and see". The market will be operated and administered by NEMMCO, the National Electricity Market Management Company Ltd. "So what?" What relevance could this possibly have for ordinary mums and dads, or potential renewable energy producers. Surprisingly perhaps, the answer is "Quite a lot!": With a little bit of prodding from the Federal Department of Environment, Sport and Territories, the NGMC has recently broadened the definition of electricity generators in the industry Code to acknowledge a role for intermittent small-scale production from sources such as wind, solar and micro-hydro. In trying for 18 months to formalise financial arrangements for grid connection and sale of energy from the Breamlea wind generator, it has certainly become apparent to me that the present Victorian market rules are lacking in detail on how to handle small-scale generators connected to the distribution part of the network ("embedded generators"). It is to the credit of CitiPower and Powercor that they have allowed network access and energy trading from Breamlea in the absence of formal arrangements. However this is certainly not the sort of commercial environment to encourage the development of large-scale wind farms: there is just too much uncertainty for any new proposal to get off the drawing board. The National Code could be in force as early as 1 October 1996, at which point it will be theoretically possible to write to your local distribution company and put forward a proposal for connecting your renewable energy system to the national grid. Not surprisingly, there is a raft of technical requirements that would have to be fulfilled to meet acceptable standards of power quality, including voltage fluctuations, harmonics and "negative sequence voltage levels". There are also requirements for protection of the generating unit itself, and for system security to be maintained. Presumably if you are not an electrical power engineer, you may have to employ a consultant to check the technical aspects of your system, and possibly to represent you in negotiations with the distribution company. The recent amendments to the National Code, which allow for small-scale generators to connect to distribution networks, seem to give a very free hand to the networks to determine your technical requirements. The goodwill of your local distribution company will therefore be crucial. The value of your energy to them will depend on how far you reside from major population centres (the further the better for you), and how much it is worth as a public relations exercise to them to be seen to be promoting renewables. The national market may well be providing another stimulus to the value of renewable energy: any Victorian distributor wishing to compete in the New South Wales market will have to comply with the NSW Government's requirements for reduction of greenhouse gases. One obvious way to achieve this is for the distributors to buy renewable energy. What scenarios are likely to be economic? If you have an existing 3 phase induction generator being powered by hydro and are currently dumping large amounts of energy into a dummy load, you probably already have the network representative knocking at the door! If a 3-phase grid connection can be done cheaply, it might return a good income. Just about any other scenario I can think of, short of a full-scale wind farm in remote coastal locations, is something you would only do for its value to you in reducing the greenhouse effect. This is because all photovoltaic and most small wind turbine systems require a very expensive grid-interactive inverter to be able to feed excess energy back into the grid. If your distribution company is willing to pay a price for your excess energy similar to the price they charge your neighbours, then the benefit of not having to have a large battery bank replaced every 5 years would eventually repay the cost of your grid-interactive inverter. Anyone seriously contemplating putting up a big grid-interactive solar array or wind generator would be well advised to study information published by NGMC on the internet at http://www.electricity.net.au/ There is a huge amount of information to sift through to find the relevant bits, but the most relevant appear to be chapters 5,6 and 10 of the Code. These are only available as zipped Word 6 files presently, although if there is sufficient interest from Soft Tech readers, I will try to "mirror" these documents on the ATA's Web pages in plain text format. Some relevant recent amendments to Chapter 5 of the Code are not yet on the Internet, but email me mickgg@suburbia.net if you need this information. Thus it seems that for the majority of urban or rural electricity users, people without huge amounts of cash to splash, it would make more economic sense to have a conventional independent electrical system of PV's battery bank and inverter, complemented by a gas fridge and stove. There may well be a role for people in country (coastal) towns to form a local wind farm co-operative, following the example of the Dutch. For those concerned about the greenhouse effect, the most cost effective way to combat it, apart from trading in your car for x bicycles ( x = number of family members!) is to install a solar water heater: do it now! I have had one on my roof for 15 years, and it's still going strong. Despite these sobering conclusions, it will be exciting to see if the big boys in the industry will facilitate the rapid roll-out of wind farms, and whether coastal landowners and their neighbours will kill wind farms with the NIMBY ("not in my back yard") syndrome.