A new project led by the Australian National University will assess the feasibility of transitioning regional New South Wales communities from grids exposed to bushfires and other natural disasters to a resilient network of islandable renewables and battery-based microgrids.

The Southcoast Microgrid Reliability Feasibility (SµRF) project was last week named as one of 20 projects around Australia to be awarded a share of $25.6 million in funding via round two of the federal government’s Regional and Remote Communities Reliability Fund.

The project is being led the Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program at ANU in partnership with the Southcoast Health and Sustainability Alliance (SHASA), network company Essential Energy, and technology company Zepben.

Dr Bjorn Sturmberg, a research leader in the ANU Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program and an long-time leader in Australia’s solar microgrid space, said the need to find more reliable, resilient and sustainable ways to power regional communities was becoming increasingly urgent.

“As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, it’s ever more critical to bolster the resilience of regional community’s power supplies,” he said last week.

“In this project we are exploring how microgrids – which pool energy generation and storage systems to maintain the power supply of a community when disconnected from the national grid – can best be deployed on the South Coast.”

Head to One Step Off The Grid for the full article.