Powering Australia’s most remote regions
Power and Water Corporation is responsible for electricity transmission and distribution, and provides water and sewerage services across the Northern Territory — an area with more than 1.3 million square kilometres and some of the most vastly distributed communities in the world.
As such, the utility must provide the bulk of power to these communities via remote power generation sites. These sites have, until recently, been powered through diesel generators that are costly to run, challenging to fuel and unsustainable.
![NT -googlemaps](https://www.sageautomation.com/hs-fs/hubfs/18%20-%20Power%20and%20Water%20Daly%20River/NT%20-googlemaps.jpg?width=438&name=NT%20-googlemaps.jpg)
Solar SETuP
Power and Water sought to transform the way these communities were powered by rolling out solar under the Northern Territory Solar Energy Transformation Program (Solar SETuP). The four-year ARENA program aimed to deliver two off-grid solar solution types for 25 remote communities:
- Solar-diesel hybrid for 24 remote communities
Solar would subsidise diesel generation to reduce fuel consumption by 15%
- Solar-battery-diesel hybrid at Nauiyu (Daly River)
A 1MW solar facility and an 800kW battery would replace diesel in prime solar hours. The system aimed to meet 50% of the community’s annual electricity needs.
The ‘brains’ behind a successful solar system
- Standard solar/diesel solution
To effectively power these communities via solar and diesel, the sites would need to be remotely controlled via a centralised control system in Darwin. Operators would also need to see solar production and diesel generator trend and historical data. They would need to be able to curtail each site’s solar output when required, to balance the load and protect against outages.
- Nauiyu solar/battery solution
In addition to this functionality, the Daly River system would need to incorporate advanced energy storage technology to enable “diesel-off” run mode where the battery supplements electricity supply during cloud cover. Effectively, this would maximise the solar intake and reduce generator use to provide a reliable, 24/7 power supply.
Getting it done
Control system and automation experts SAGE Automation were engaged to deliver this critical component of the system. Having delivered and serviced more than 50 of Power and Water’s control systems since 2007, SAGE were able to deliver a maintainable and scalable solution to allow the rapid rollout of solar.