Glenn Platt, keynote speaker at the National Electrical and Communications Association conference in South Africa, outlines some changes he expects in the next five years.

 The world of electricity is just embarking on an exciting new journey, and there will be a rare level of upheaval associated with the coming changes.

If Thomas Edison, great-great-grandfather of the AC electricity system, were alive he’d probably recognise most of the components in our networks. That tells you just how slowly things have developed over the past century.

However, great change is on the way. In another five years our hypothetical Edison probably would not recognise many technologies that will be commonplace. The good news is that enormous opportunities for electrical and communications contractors will accompany this change.

Perhaps the most significant change, which we are already seeing, is the rise of distributed generation.

Today’s large, centralised power stations fired by gas or coal will soon be replaced by much smaller generators located much closer to where we use the power.

Perhaps the most familiar of these is the solar electricity generator, which we now see on roofs all over Australia. Yet we are just starting with the solar revolution. Australia has about 1.4 million solar installations covering some 12% of homes, and even the most conservative commentators expect this to dramatically increase.

Many leading organisations, including CSIRO, expect distributed generation such as solar to make up 50% of generation in the decades to come. That’s about three million additional installations.

There are many benefits in generating electricity from solar. However, the main driver for this increased uptake won’t be a ‘green’ philosophy, or saving the world by combating climate change. It’s just going to be simple economics.

In many parts of Australia, electricity from solar panels is cheaper than retail electricity from the grid, and the price of solar will continue to drop. In fact it has been decreasing by about 20% every two years for decades.

In many parts of the world the biggest cost in a new a solar system is not the purchase price of the panels, or the installation labour, or the inverter. It is actually the finance – or, more to the point, the interest being charged to fund the system.

However, as banks and the broader industry become more familiar with the technology, interest rates for funding solar could easily fall.

Of course, electricity from solar is not without its challenges. What happens on rainy days or at night?

Storing electricity during such times has been difficult. Battery systems have been available for years, but they are expensive and need careful maintenance, so their use has been limited for suburban houses.

Once again, this is all changing. And, once again, it’s being driven by simple economics. The arrival of new battery technologies such as advanced lead acid and lithium batteries has completely transformed things.

Compact, maintenance-free battery systems are appearing on the market from vendors such as Panasonic, LG, Samsung, Tesla and Enphase. These new batteries are designed for domestic installations, and prices have been decreasing at an amazing rate.

Common lithium battery cells have been about 15% cheaper each year for several years, and many independent commentators predict that they will be commonplace before too long.

However, a high-concentration of solar systems can make voltage control on the electricity grid quite difficult to manage. In the past, such concerns might have limited the uptake of solar, but once again things are changing dramatically.

New inverters and Australian Standards (AS4777) are introducing functionality that helps maintain power quality. These inverters can provide, or absorb, reactive power and help prop up the grid around them.

Rather than large numbers of solar inverters being considered a risk, they will soon be seen as an asset for the electricity grid.

The new capabilities have been demonstrated on a huge scale in Hawaii. The grid operator recognised that the amount of solar generation was close to the capacity of Hawaii’s largest conventional generator. It was decided to reconfigure many of the solar inverters so they could ‘ride through’ disturbances, thereby helping to stabilise the grid.

The grid operator contacted the control room of Enphase, the manufacturer of many of the solar inverters in Hawaii. Working in real time, Enphase engineers in Los Angeles were able to transmit a command that reconfigured more than 800,000 solar inverters on 51,000 homes so they would stay online despite rapidly swinging grid conditions.

It’s worth pausing here. Imagine what this reliability factor will do to the uptake of the technology across Australia.

Even if our Edison could get his head around the localised generation, storage and reactive power control on the power system of the immediate future, things won’t stay this way for long.

Already in Australia trials are under way of microgrids and ‘transactional’ systems, in which local houses and other buildings essentially trade energy. This provides complete independence from the grid and often improves power quality and reliability.

In doing so, these systems demonstrate that we don’t really need base-load power. What’s needed is generation carefully matched to supply at any instant.

To achieve this, microgrids are managed by automated controllers that can accurately predict future load and generation, then actively manage loads and energy storage to keep things in balance with the available generation. They do this while maintaining power quality to the end user.

Driven by economics, with the bonus of practical benefits, the uptake of distributed solar and battery storage in Australia is akin to the disruption that digital photography caused to film, or the mobile phone caused to telephony.

Although the approaching changes will be widespread and profound, they aren’t anything to be afraid of. On the contrary, they represent a great opportunity for electrical and communications contractors.

The new technologies – solar, batteries, energy management systems, and so on – operate on the core electrical and communications principles we are used to. There are additional skills to learn, but it’s not an entire change in direction.

These are labour-intensive sectors that can help the economy. The solar industry in the United States employs more people than the coal industry. It even employs more people than Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook combined.

Large investment banks such as Morgan Stanley and UBS (not exactly crazy greenies or renewable energy zealots) are publishing papers on how they expect solar and batteries to be a huge industry over the next few years.

For example, Morgan Stanley predicts that about 2.4 million Australian homes will install solar and battery systems, with a payback time to the household of less than 10 years. Ultimately, this means more work, more challenges, and more opportunities for our industry.

Somehow I think Edison would have been a bit disappointed if he had come back and recognised so much of our electricity system so many years on from his initial inventions. However, if he knew about the huge changes just around the corner, I think he’d be excited for us all.

Edison once said: “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits …”

Exciting times are ahead – hustle on, I say.

Glenn Platt leads the Grids and Energy Efficiency program within CSIRO’s Energy Flagship, focusing on solving the energy challenges of consumers, business and grids. The program’s work ranges across energy storage, electric vehicles, smart grids and the integration of large-scale solar systems, solar cooling, energy management systems, economics, and understanding people’s response and uptake of particular low-carbon energy options.