On 7 February, Australia solemnly marked the anniversary of an electrical fault.
It was on this date in 2009 that Melbourne endured its hottest conditions on record – a sweltering 46.4C.
To make matters worse, hot winds blasted through the region at speeds in excess of 100km/h. In Kilmore East, just north of Melbourne, a critical failure in a 43-year-old power line caused bursts of 5000C plasma to arc out and ignite the tinder-dry vegetation in the gully below.
Fanned by such extreme winds, the fast-growing inferno would by the end of the day be responsible for the majority of the 173 lives lost in the dozens of fires that engulfed Victoria on Black Saturday, Australia’s worst bushfire disaster.
Several of the other blazes that day were started by felled power poles and other electrical issues. This was also the case for many other fires before and since, including Australia’s previous-worst bushfire tragedy, the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, which claimed 75 lives.
Richard Turner, director of South Australian renewable energy powerhouse Zen Energy, has a plan to stop such a thing happening again.
The 51-year-old entrepreneur is on a mission to replace ageing statewide energy infrastructure with community microgrids of rooftop solar and increasingly affordable battery storage systems. Although there are significant challenges in taking people off the grid, he sees areas hit by bushfires as the best place to start.
Turner argues statewide energy systems are inefficient at the best of times, but that in fire danger areas, the case for switching to localised solar-and-storage is particularly compelling in both a safety and economic sense.
“Fundamentally climate change is moving us towards more and more extreme summers and more bushfires,” he says.
“Utility companies have been hit with some huge class action suits over recent years over fires, and in response they are shutting down power lines [on bushfire risk days] earlier and for longer, leaving communities without power for significant periods.”
In 2014 Black Saturday bushfire victims secured an Australian-record $494.7m payout from power distributor SP AusNet asset managers Utility Services Group and the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and regulators are keen to avoid a repeat.
Turner notes that turning off the power during the sweltering heat of bushfire risk days isn’t just uncomfortable for those affected, but potentially dangerous given people often rely on electricity to power the devices that alert them to bushfire danger and the water pumps used to defend their home.
Up against the companies invested in preserving the status quo in the energy network as well as next-generation competitors in the battery-storage area such as American giant Tesla – which has just entered the Australian market – Zen Energy is busily presenting its case around the country.
Turner says his company has been in productive talks with Victorian energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio over the prospect of subsidising Zen Energy systems capable of running as a localised backup for periods when the grid needs to be switched off.
“They’ve committed to act on this but being government, it will take time,” he says.
Zen Energy is also trying to get in on the action in Western Australia, where company chairman and former federal government climate advisor Ross Garnaut has, according to Turner, been in discussions with state authorities regarding distributed power systems.
D’Ambrosio’s counterpart in Western Australia, energy minister Mike Nahan, has signalled that grid operator Western Power is considering going a step further than Victoria’s plans.
In Australian ecosystems, bushfires have long played a crucial role in burning through established vegetation to clear the way for new growth, and Western Australia is taking the same view of the energy infrastructure wiped out by the Yarloop bushfires in January – don’t replace what was there before, but rather introduce the energy systems of the 21st century.
The cost of the rebuild of the energy infrastructure network from those fires has been estimated at $26m following the destruction of 873 power poles, 77 transmission poles, 44 transformers and up to 50 kilometres of overhead power lines.
In some of the affected areas, Western Power is investigating the viability of solar-and-storage not just as a backup, but as a standalone system without links to the grid.
Other options being implemented by Australian state governments to fireproof their energy systems include undergrounding power lines or outfitting networks with rapid earth fault current limiters (REFCL).
Lu Aye, associate professor in the department of infrastructure engineering at the University of Melbourne, notes however that the cost of maintaining an ageing infrastructure grid will only get worse.
“Smaller distributed power systems, from a cost and safety perspective, are in many ways the better option,” he says.
That’s without even factoring in the bigger picture.
When it comes to bushfires, the most significant benefit of switching over to green energy solar-and-storage systems is not the mitigation of today’s risks, but the reduction of carbon emissions and thus the frequency and severity of such disasters in the future.
After all, as any firefighter worth their salt will attest, the best way to deal with bushfires is to take decisive action early, before things get out of control.
