Attributed to Ben Bristow (Head of Grid Transformation at Western Power)
As Western Power’s Head of Grid Transformation, Ben Bristow is charged with planning for the rapidly changing future of the transmission and distribution network for Western Australia’s South West Interconnected Network.
Ben is responsible for overall network strategy, including the development of reliability, power quality, network improvement strategies, and the conversion of planning into functional standards, business rules, and guidelines to support engineering and future modelling of the network.
With more than 18 years of experience with Western Power, Ben is using his engineering expertise and extensive knowledge of the energy sector to drive an innovative evolution of the network to support customers’ energy choices.
He leads his function team in the development and delivery of network-related investment proposals in line with operational, financial, regulatory, and customer/stakeholder requirements and steers pilot projects across the network, including stand-alone power systems, microgrids, and utility-scale battery energy storage solutions.
Grid transformation engine, translating concepts into reality
Here in Western Australia, our network is different; we have one of the world’s largest islanded grids that spans 254,000 sqm, presenting unique, sometimes difficult, but always exciting challenges in ensuring the continuous power supply to more than two million customers.
How we manage the South West Interconnected Network (SWIN), which includes both the transmission and distribution networks, is always evolving as we look to develop, trial, and incorporate new technologies and delve deeper into our data.
Our path towards decarbonisation and enabling renewables' rapid growth and integration into the network has seen us think outside the box - how can we enhance and improve customer energy solutions while ensuring equity for all?
In planning for the changing energy landscape, which is being evidenced around the world, we’re transforming to a modular grid to ensure a cleaner, brighter, and more resilient energy supply for the next generation.
We want to ensure that we continue to meet the changing energy needs of Western Australians, and this means looking at how we can better manage the network and deploy innovative customer solutions.
We are aiming to ensure that Western Power can support greater energy needs being delivered by renewable resources by 2031. Already there is close to 2GW of solar PV connected to our distribution network - that’s one in three households, and this is set to be one-in-two by 2030.
How we’ve planned for a safe, decarbonised, and reliable network of the future with the growth of renewables and changing climate has seen the birth of GTEng - an innovative proof of concept scenario modelling tool called the Grid Transformation Engine that we’ve developed in-house.
This ground-breaking modelling maps out what our distribution network will look like in 10, 20, and 30-plus years, enabling a new dimension in our decision-making. GTEng uses intelligence from our data processing, electrical engineering, modelling, and optimisation methods to form a cutting-edge planning tool that allows for multiple scenarios around future power needs and use.
It processes complex and wide-ranging data to create visualisations and forecasts of different scenarios, including population and demographic predictions, economic forecasts, customer needs and profiles, energy generation and loads, energy use, and location mapping.
It involves multiple stages of data processing with different filters applied at each stage, which help us visualise what the potential energy landscape will look like and what we need to maintain and improve the power supply.
As a Government Trading Enterprise (GTE) and critical service provider, the community is at the centre of everything we do. To that end, we built out customer profiles by engaging customer groups and understanding their current and future energy uses, including looking at things like battery and solar PV uptake. We then spread that information across our customer base to create different energy forecasting scenarios.
Together when you combine the forecasts and customer demand profiles across the different scenarios, we get a unique view and clarity on the most efficient ways to service energy needs. It’s exciting in that we get to look at it from a clean sheet perspective – what would we do in an ideal state across those multiple scenarios?
The results have been fantastic and extremely insightful, laying the foundation for a new way of thinking about how we better plan for the future.
A key insight we’ve seen so far is the benefits of urban undergrounding power for our inner metro customer profiles while maintaining poles and wires for customers in the outer metro area.
We also now know that a significant proportion of our overhead distribution network, more than fifty percent, could be transformed into an autonomous grid using stand-alone power systems (SPS) and microgrids.
With this new understanding, we’re now progressing from the network of today to the grid of tomorrow. This involves transition pathways and looking at our maintenance and renewal strategies and other inputs to be able to understand the most efficient economic pathway to transition the network. And this is where the GTEng comes into its own.
Already we’re deploying SPS in regional locations where there are network and customer benefits. GTEng enables us to identify distribution network feeders with different spurs that could evolve into an autonomous grid. It looks at each spur's age, risk, and customer use and creates a net present cost view of using a traditional network solution versus an innovative solution such as an SPS.
SPS provides our regional customers with a cost-effective, safe, and reliable alternative to pole-and-wire power distribution, particularly in regional and remote locations where supply costs are high and power reliability and quality are impacted by distance, access issues, terrain, and events like storms and bushfires.
Since rolling out our first pilot SPS in 2016, we now have more than 150 across the grid, and we’re looking to deploy 1,000 in the next four years and 4,000 units in the coming decade. Modelling has shown that if we roll out 6,000 SPS, we'll be able to decommission more than 23,000kms of overhead assets.
While SPS is a significant part of the transformation process, we’re aiming even higher and looking to transform around fifty percent of our distribution asset base.
The GTEng also provides greater insights into the use and prevalence of distributed energy resources (DER) and the need for DER orchestration. The impact of solar PV penetration on parts of the network highlights the need for coordination to mitigate overload and the need for augmentation.
Other scenarios we’re looking at include how EV charging, say at six o'clock in the evening, could impact the low-voltage network and what augmentation would be required. This has helped inform our underground strategy in the metropolitan area.
About 60 percent of the Perth metropolitan area now has underground power, with around 90,000 homes and businesses converted from overhead to underground power since undergrounding began in 1996. Western Power has identified a further 300 projects across the metro area that will benefit from underground power in the next two decades.
As a stand-alone grid, we collaborate more broadly with other energy utilities and agencies in WA, and due to GTEng’s scalability, we’ve been able to share forecasting scenarios for generation planning.
This has provided us with a unique environment where we've got consistent information being used at the distribution, transmission, and generation levels, all of which are being driven by customer needs.
We’ve basically created an ecosystem of modelling.
We’re now looking at how we can expand our proof of concept for distribution into a transmission modelling tool and then ultimately, more broadly, integrate generation. This builds on the work we've done to successfully trial innovative solutions like SPS, battery storage, and the Kalbarri microgrid. Along with improving DER integration, the coordination of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and modernised connection standards for DER, we can successfully plan for greater amounts of grid-connected storage to help manage a mix of energy generation.
The GTEng’s modeling ecosystem helps inform the whole of system planning for WA by providing a consistent suite of information that's been able to give us a quality outcome across the board.
It’s enabled us to trial and successfully progress transformational investment in existing assets and new technology on our path towards a modular grid ensuring better power outcomes for Western Australians.
