A solid house is only as strong as its foundations, and a business and its budget is no different. With rising input costs, more competitive industry structures and lower pricing expectations, there is an ever-increasing emphasis on efficiency and productivity for energy and water businesses. It therefore isn’t surprising that a consistent theme emerging across the…
Here comes the sun Consumers are increasingly active in the Australian energy market. As has been extensively documented elsewhere, Australia has the highest proportion of ‘prosumers’ (energy-producing households) in the world, with more than 1.7 million domestic solar photovoltaic installations. There is now around 6GW of systems sized at 100kW and below[1]. By 2050, the…
On Monday 27th November, MHC were proud sponsors of an Australian Institute of Energy event in Melbourne on demand response. A big crowd of about 100 people packed into the Trust bar in Melbourne to hear from an impressive line-up of speakers from AEMO, ARENA, EnergyAustralia and Coles, who insightfully provided the voice of the…
The challenge In June 2017, ARENA and AEMO launched a tender to secure a demand response market in South Australia and Victoria to secure approximately 100MW of response capacity by summer 2017/2018. ARENA specifically indicated that $22.5m of funding would be made available to institutions, businesses and/or aggregators who could propose more than 5MW of…
In the first of a series of articles on the rapidly evolving domain of grid edge markets, we take a closer look at the increasing number of value streams available to distributed energy resources (DERs) particularly as they begin to become aggregated and orchestrated by virtual power plant technology. But with opportunity comes risk –…
Australia’s energy markets are delivering unprecedented electricity price increases and volatility. As significant electricity users, water utilities are clearly exposed to these forces. Balancing these risks is the opportunity to adopt alternative technology solutions and participate in existing and emergent markets. This Emerging Issue identifies the technology solutions and markets, shows how some water utilities…
With the lion’s share of recent demand response efforts focusing on the commercial and industrial sectors, are opportunities being missed in the residential sector? Or is convincing Australian households to switch off just not worth it? In this article, MHC summarises results from several trials from Australia and overseas. Using key learnings from these trials, we…
Western Water is experiencing a major period of growth, with its served population expected to increase from 155,000 people in 2013 to 194,000 by the end of the current water plan period in 2018. A longer-range estimate of 500,000 people is forecast for 2030.[1] Western Water’s strategic plan has a core strategic theme that is…
North Western Power (NWP) identified a financial opportunity to build a 5MW solar farm in regional QLD. NWP had already conducted an initial technical feasibility study to assess the connection potential, including the capex, opex and likely energy generation, however required a detailed business case and financial model to assess the financial returns and to…
A regional Australian water business has implemented a Productivity Improvement Strategy based on an in-house model which continues to be the preferred option for delivery of maintenance services. Whilst the business made it very clear that undertaking formal market testing of Civil and EMM maintenance services was highly unlikely in the short to medium term,…