When everyone else lost power, Kate’s stayed on. Here’s why

In the case of Loy Yang A, the power station will remain open until 2035. In NSW, Liddell recently closed its doors last year, but the government is in discussions with Origin Energy to keep Eraring open possibly beyond its 2025 timeframe.

Rather than wait, many communities and individuals have opted to take matters into their own hands, investing in solar panels on rooftops or household batteries to reduce costs and their environmental footprint.

In some cases, microgrids are providing entire communities with energy certainty. A microgrid is a small network of electricity users with a local source of supply that can be attached to the centralised system but allows them to operate independently.

Microgrids are nothing new. The first public electricity system rolled out in Tamworth in 1888, when the town switched on 21.5 kilometres of electrical street light, the first of its kind anywhere in Australia. Sydney would turn its first electrical light on 15 years later.

In Victoria, microgrid towns include Yackandandah in Victoria’s northeast, Mallacoota and Phillip Island.  

Meanwhile, Bawley Point and Kioloa on NSW South Coast became the first community to get a microgrid from Endeavour Energy and the NSW government last year. The microgrid links about 340 household rooftop solar and home battery systems, serving about 1000 customers.

During an outage, the microgrid will be activated, drawing electricity stored in household batteries to keep the lights on across the communities while power is restored.

Bawley Point resident Luci Somers the decision to join the grid was a no-brainer. She’d gone through the Black Summer Bushfires when the entire community had lost power and water.

Just a few months after, the town was devastated by torrential rain, and the town lost access to clean water, again. Somers was living in survival mode, putting out buckets to catch rainwater in case they lost access again and she was considering leaving the coastal community.

Until the microgrid.

“Through that whole bushfire, even though it was terrible, the best feeling that came out of it was that we all helped each other, we supported each other in the aftermath. That process continued through setting up the microgrid. We are contributing to being more sustainable and self-sufficient if anything like that happens again,” she said.

Just a few months ago, when the south coast was inundated by rain and the lights went out, the microgrid kicked in. Although only for a short time, Somers said it was exciting to see it work.

Time has, for the most part, helped heal Somers, but having reliable energy that can keep the town online through wind, hail, fire and flood has been life-changing.

Director of Climate Energy Finance Tim Buckley, a public interest think tank, said Tuesday’s blackout shows why it is important the energy market diversify, particularly as climate change escalates and extreme weather becomes more extreme and more frequent.

“Our power system needs to factor this in as part of sensible adaptation. Victoria, like Australia, is on notice. We need to plan and build in energy system resilience as a key priority, and invest in a modern, flexible grid that is future-proofed,” he said.

Buckley added that thermal coal power plants were not part of that solution, instead they were the problem.

“Australia’s world-leading distributed rooftop solar and battery residential systems can be built in a day, or for commercial properties, a month, at speed and scale,” he said.

He added that to ensure there was greater energy resilience, there had to be more financial incentives to reassure both the industry and consumers that they would be supported in their decision to install batteries or solar panels.

Solar panel installation has rapidly increased over the years – much faster than hydro, wind or solar water heaters. Data from the Clean Energy regulator notes that since 2020, there have consistently been more than 300,000 small-scale solar installations a year, with a total of 3.6 million installed since 2001.

In comparison, 1.6 million solar water heaters have been installed in the past 22 years, and 424 wind systems.

Monash University faculty of engineering associate professor Behrooz Bahrani said relying on microgrids or going off-grid may not be suitable across the country, but made sense in some regional communities.

This is because they can be cheaper to build, run and maintain than traditional distribution lines that rely on fossil fuel-intensive projects, where if one thing goes wrong, power goes out across the entire area.

Household rooftop solar or battery offers a diversified source of energy. “You have thousands or millions of small generators that are all interconnected to each other and this increases resilience. That is a good thing,” he said. “There are also different types of energy sources which all add to the reliability of the grid. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket.”

Bahrani added as extreme weather became more frequent and intense, and as global warming continued, communities needed to be more energy-prepared and resilient. While new projects were addressing this, he said it was not happening at the pace needed.

This was because many of the decisions about what type, where and when to build new renewable energy projects were financially motivated, Bahrani said.

“They do not take into account the bigger threat: climate change. We need to take it more seriously. We need to not only look at these renewables as a financially viable project, we should look at these projects as quickly as possible if we are to make sure to sustain life,” he added. “The problem is we have never gone through a transition like this before, we don’t know what can happen if we don’t invest enough now.”

Could you make the switch?

Australia’s 3.5 million rooftop solar installations are pumping out so much energy on sunny days that they’re sending wholesale electricity prices into negative territory, forcing large-scale wind and solar farms, as well as coal plants, to reduce generation.

Over the past 30 days, rooftops contributed 14.6 per cent to the grid. Bundled together with other renewables such as solar farms, wind and hydro, they generated 42 per cent of the country’s energy over the same period, according to OpenNEM.org.au.

If you’re curious about how you might be able to go off-grid, or at least install solar panels, solar water heaters or small-scale wind systems, the federal government provides financial incentives.

Bahrani added it’s not just a government issue: rather everyone has a role to play. We need to look at how much energy we consume and if we can reduce how much we use.

Meanwhile, Nottingham said while it might seem overwhelming for people who wanted to make the switch, it was easier than they might think.

“Just take it step by step, make small changes, talk to people and figure out what the best way about it is.”