Smart Grids in the State of Tasmania

This case study concentrated on households living off-grid in Tasmania, in collaboration with my colleague Dr Phillipa Watson at the University of Tasmania, and recently published in Energy Policy (2019). It also involved theoretical explorations around the role of place and the possibilities for rural innovation in the electricity sector.

Off grid households in Tasmania

How we produce and consume electricity is changing: more of us have rooftop solar, there is greater opportunity to purchase household battery storage, and detailed energy data is more widely available. A growing concern of utilities and governments in Australia is that large numbers of people will opt to leave the electricity grid (i.e. centralised electricity provision), as it becomes increasingly technically feasible and cost-effective to do so. As part of this workstream I explored the nature of the changes already underway in the Australian electricity sector, through a case study of off-grid households in Tasmania.

The guiding overall research question for the empirical research was ‘How many households are currently off grid in Tasmania?’ Having first established that there was no state-wide or federal collection of this type of data, the research comprised two broad approaches. First, attempts to gather whole of market data through a number of different methods: using TasNetworks data on cancelled new connection applications (2012+); a phone survey of specialist installers & architects in Tasmania; and telephone and email enquiries with several state and federal expert organisations including the Clean Energy Regulator, Clean Energy Council, Department of State Growth, OTTER, Sustainable Living Tasmania, and Living Off Grid Tasmania.

The second approach has involved conducting an online survey of off grid households in Tasmania, combined with follow up phone interviews and home visits.

Further detail on this research can be found in Energy Policy (2019), a Briefing Paper (PDF 711.3KB), and in a video of a public lecture I gave as part of the 2016 Royal Society of Tasmania Winter Lecture Series, as well as a presentation "What we know about households that are already off grid" that I gave at the 2015 Australian Utility Week Conference. I also did a radio interview in mid-2016 with ABC local radio.

Smart grid innovation in rural communities

This area of research explored the possibility of remote rural communities being at the forefront of smart grid innovation. This is because it is in rural areas that the existing centralised grid infrastructure is hardest (and therefore most expensive) to maintain. It is suggested that the bias in scholarship towards innovation in urban areas means that rural innovation tends to be overlooked

Outputs include:

• a journal paper co-authored with Dr Phillipa Watson and Veryan Hann in the journal Energy Research and Social Science (2018) ‘Rural laboratories and experiment at the fringes: A case study of a smart grid on Bruny Island, Australia’;
• a conference paper at the Grid-City Workshop, Sydney, Australia, 26^th-27^th July 2017. ‘Off-grid or on-grid? Analysis of households with battery storage in the State of Tasmania, Australia’