Australia’s infrastructure utilisation opportunity
by Tony Wood
Streamlining the planning of and approvals for energy infrastructure would remove a major drag on Australia’s net-zero transformation, and this is a target for the Economic Reform Roundtable. Yet greater economic gains could be made from another area: capital infrastructure utilisation.
Our electricity supply system is built to meet peak demand, every hour of every day. That means this hugely capital-intensive system is dramatically underutilised. Electricity demand comes within 10 per cent of the annual peak less than 20 hours per year.
For more than 200 years storage has solved that problem for gas. Battery storage offers the same solution for electricity.
Electricity can be stored when it’s produced, and dispatched when it’s needed in the distribution and transmission grids. This would dramatically increase utilisation of the existing grid, and reduce the investment needed to meet future demand.
Storing electricity near solar rooftops – where it’s produced and used – would increase utilisation of zero-marginal-cost solar power, much of which is now increasingly dumped rather than stored to be used when needed.
The right planning, pricing, and regulations can unlock huge gains in capital infrastructure productivity. Not simple, but it’s the sort of challenge that should be embraced.