Iain Macgill

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications

This study aims to prepare the energy sector for uncertainty using a foresight tool known as weak signals. Weak signals (subtle signs of emerging issues with significant impact potential) are often overlooked during strategic planning due to their inherent predictive uncertainty. However, the value does not lie in precise forecasting but in broaden...

Energy resilience in bushfires and extreme weather events: Final report of the ESKIES project

Across several power systems with market frameworks, policy-makers are proposing that balancing flexibility requirements emerging during energy transition be addressed through new reserve product markets. However, these may introduce additional costs, constraints and complexity, and even encroach upon the functions of existing operational practices...

Australia’s electricity networks are experiencing low demand during the day due to excessive residential solar export and high demand during the evening on days of extreme temperature due to high air conditioning use. Pre-cooling and solar pre-cooling are demand-side management strategies with the potential to address both these issues. However, th...

Extensive scaling of green hydrogen to meet net-zero targets would need the integration of suitable resources, high renewable energy potential and achievement of supporting techno-economic parameters to establish viable hydrogen projects. Herein, we propose a comprehensive four-tier framework based on specially designed open-source tools that build...

Ammonia plays a vital role in feeding the world through fertilizer production, as well as having other industrial uses. However, current ammonia production processes rely heavily on fossil fuels, mostly natural gas, to generate hydrogen as a feedstock. There is an urgent need to re-design and decarbonise the production process to reduce greenhouse...

Purpose of Review To investigate the interaction between restructured electricity market designs, in particular Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM), and variable renewable generators. In particular, to examine how the expansion of near-zero marginal cost, variable renewable generators may impact participant incentives and market power. R...

Ever increasing numbers of air-conditioners and, in many places, more extreme weather and urban overheating are placing additional stresses on electricity networks globally, reflecting not only their high power draw but also highly correlated operation driven by weather conditions. The resulting peak demands can be considerably greater than average...

For restructured electricity industries undergoing energy transition, designing effective and efficient frequency control arrangements is a complex and ongoing task that requires appropriate configuration of controllers, generator technical connection requirements, market arrangements and wider policy settings. In this paper, we provide an overview...

Green hydrogen (H2) is emerging as a future clean energy carrier. While there exists significant analysis on global renewable (and non-renewable) hydrogen generation costs, analysis of its transportation costs, irrespective of production method, is still limited. Complexities include the different forms in which hydrogen can be transported, the lim...

Pre-cooling is a method to shift peak air conditioning demand to off-peak and shoulder hours by utilizing energy storage in the thermal mass of buildings. This paper evaluates the pre-cooling potential of a range of residential buildings broadly representative of the Australian housing stock. Pre-cooling in 2-, 6-, and 8-star buildings with light,...

Battery electrified public transit (BEPT), including buses and passenger ferries, is a promising solution to transport-related climate emissions and urban air pollution, but introduces potentially challenging large, coincident demand in the low-voltage distribution network. This paper presents a tool for estimating the energy and charging demand of...

Deployment of rooftop solar photovoltaics on multi-family buildings lags behind other residential buildings sectors, despite the benefit of significantly higher self-consumption achievable by applying on-site generation to aggregated building load. This is, in part, because of challenges in developing suitable business models to ensure the fair all...

Air conditioning is responsible for a considerable proportion of households’ electricity bills. During summer afternoons when households usually run their air conditioners, the retail time-of-use electricity tariffs are highest, and there is a peak demand in the electricity network. Pre-cooling is a method to shift air conditioning demand from peak...

Australia has world leading uptake of distributed PV (D-PV) and increasing installations of battery energy storage systems (BESS). D-PV and BESS can provide various economic and environmental benefits to energy users, network companies and other industry stakeholders. However, integrating increasing levels of D-PV into electricity networks present...

Australia has world leading uptake of distributed PV (D-PV) and increasing installations of battery energy storage systems (BESS). Recent reports estimate one in four households own D-PV and installation rates are anticipated to grow in the years ahead. D-PV and BESS can provide various economic and environmental benefits to energy users, network c...

The PV penetration in many countries is continuously growing and PV is becoming a major energy source in the future electricity grid worldwide. Therefore, PV systems and PV hybrids need to take over more and more system responsibility by providing ancillary services. Ancillary service “means a service necessary for the operation of a transmission o...

Pacific Island Countries and Territories have set ambitious targets for energy access and the transition to sustainable energy. These efforts, however, are being severely impacted by shocks and stresses such as climate change, natural hazards and the COVID-19 pandemic. Resilience is a central pillar for energy policy in the region, but innovative a...

Subscription-based microgrids have been deployed to serve electricity needs of rural communities due to their simple user interfaces and basic energy management requirements. However, these projects often suffer from economic inefficiency to sustain long term operations, lacking insufficient price signals and demand side, as well as uncertainties a...

The PV penetration in many countries is continuously growing and PV is becoming a major energy source in the future electricity grid worldwide. Therefore, PV systems and PV hybrids need to take over more and more system responsibility by providing ancillary services. The report highlights the status and the potential of PV and PV hybrids as an anci...

Appliance level control and automation is an increasingly promising demand-side management tool with growing installation of advanced metering, monitoring and control infrastructure in both residential and commercial contexts. Successful implementation of appliance control and automation can alleviate network peak demand and improve distributed pho...

Water heating is one of the most energy intensive applications in households and domestic electric water heating systems (DEWH) offer large thermal storage for moving electrical load across the day. This study uses a unique dataset from 410 households and presents a comprehensive analysis of electricity consumption and hot water draw of DEWH for th...

Wind and solar are increasingly cost-competitive as well as environmentally less harmful alternatives to the fossil-fuel generation that dominates most electricity industries. However, their highly variable and somewhat unpredictable output still requires high levels of dispatchable plants to ensure demand can be met at times of low renewables avai...

The high variability and intermittency of wind and solar farms raise questions of how to operate electrolyzers reliably, economically, and sustainably using predominantly or exclusively variable renewables. To address these questions, we develop a comprehensive cost framework that extends to include factors such as performance degradation, efficien...

Hydrogen (H2) generation using Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) is at present the most economical and preferred pathway for commercial H2 generation. This process, however, emits a considerable amount of CO2, ultimately negating the benefit of using H2 as a clean industrial feedstock and energy carrier. That has prompted growing interest in enabling C...

This study analyses distributed photovoltaic (D-PV) system curtailment and impacts on consumers in response to high network voltages. Novel analytical techniques are applied to a unique real-world operational dataset of over 1,300 D-PV systems in South Australia to identify ‘tripping’. Data-driven methods are valuable due to the diverse range of D-...

The short-term characteristics of utility-scale PV variability become increasingly important for power system operation as PV penetrations grow. However, understanding how these characteristics and their aggregated impacts will change with new PV deployments is challenging given the limited and highly site dependent availability of high-resolution...

Electricity industries in emerging economies face particular challenges in delivering affordable, environmentally sustainable, and secure power given growing demand and limited financial resources. While supply reliability is often poor and emission reductions given lower priority, solar and wind are now amongst our cheapest supply options but high...

A key initiative in the Energy Security Board’s (ESB) post-2025 National Electricity Market (NEM) design work is how best to design system services arrangements (including frequency control, ramping and reserves and system strength services) to meet the technical needs of the power system during energy transition. As a part of this process, the ESB...

A key initiative in the Energy Security Board’s (ESB) post-2025 National Electricity Market design work is how best to design system services arrangements to meet the technical needs of the power system during the energy transition. As a part of this process, the ESB has used the electricity market rule change process to accelerate the design proce...

Understanding competition in electricity markets is fundamental to developing good regulatory, market design and associated policy frameworks for the electricity sector. Where and when competition is effective, appropriate market designs can be largely left to run; where it is not, interventions may be needed. Despite the need to monitor competitio...

Although the amount of solar photovoltaic systems installed in residential buildings is increasing globally, it is largely limited to single-occupancy dwellings and is extremely uneven across jurisdictions. Deployment on apartment buildings remains low, even in Australia with its world-leading residential photovoltaic penetration, or in countries s...

The growing deployment of utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) in electricity industries raises many concerns for power system operation. Due to the highly variable and somewhat unpredictable characteristics of short-term PV output, the system operator faces challenges in balancing electricity supply and demand, which increases the need for short-term f...

The Energy Security Board (ESB) is currently investigating electricity market design transformation given the changing nature of energy services and users in a post-2025 National Electricity Market (NEM). In September, the ESB released a consultation paper asking for feedback on seven market design initiatives that were being considered. Our submi...

Australia provides an interesting case study for the challenges of end-to-end electricity market design given its National Electricity Market (NEM) arrangements, growing utility wind and solar penetrations, and world leading uptake of distributed energy resources. In this paper, we consider lessons from the NEM for end-to-end market design that del...

It's a sunny spring day in South Australia. A light breeze is cooling the coastal state capital of Adelaide as approximately 260,000 distributed solar photovoltaic systems (D-PVs) on residential and business rooftops generate electricity, setting a new State record for lowest minimum electrical demand for the third time this spring. All looks peace...

This technical brief provides an update on the nempy python package v1.0.0. It includes a summary of its features, accuracy, run-time, documentation, support plan and ongoing work.

The electricity sector has a key role to play in the sustainable energy transition. The falling costs of wind and solar PV have added to both the opportunities yet also challenges of balancing sometimes competing industry objectives of costs, security, and environmental impacts. This paper presents novel techniques for assessing possible future ind...

The aim of this study is to obtain more realistic estimations of the achievable capacity factor and availability of waste-to-energy power plants to better understand their economics, and hence facilitate appropriate deployment. Towards this aim, we introduce Markov analysis and off-design considerations into the calculation of plant performance. Pa...

The Energy Security Board commissioned the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets at the University of New South Wales to undertake analysis of voltage on the LV networks within the NEM, as well as distributed PV’s influence on that voltage. This work used a unique dataset of maximum and minimum voltage measurements over 12,000 sites in the LV...

As distributed photovoltaics (PV) levels increase around the world, it is becoming apparent that the aggregate behavior of many small-scale PV systems during major power system disturbances may pose a significant system security threat if unmanaged. Alternatively, appropriate coordination of these systems might greatly assist in managing such distu...

In the context of increasing retail electricity prices, rooftop PV is a potential low-cost source of electricity for residential customers. Hence, over two million Australian homes have solar PV on their rooftops. However, the penetration of rooftop PV on apartment buildings is shallow in Australia compared to single-unit households, due to regulat...

Australia's National Electricity Market (NEM) is experiencing a rapid transformation toward renewable electricity generation. To ensure energy adequacy, reliability, and security, the possible future electricity generation portfolios should be comprehensively investigated. Over the past few years, the significant decline in the cost of renewable en...

Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) between end-users of electricity and renewable energy generators are of increasing significance in the Australian electricity sector. PPAs, depending on how they are structured, can allow end-users to achieve several objectives, including supporting renewable energy development, meeting corporate emissions reduction...

Electricity access is a key driver of socioeconomic development of a nation, and a critical catalyst to achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Unfortunately Papua New Guinea (PNG) faces an acute electrification challenge with the majority of the population, especially in rural communities living without basic access to electricity. This...

Some two million distributed PV systems have been installed on rooftops across Australia over the past decade but there is surprisingly little data available about inverter market trends and therefore their potential behaviour and impact on the grid. This paper seeks to remedy this gap with regard to inverter specifications including rated AC power...

As subsidised feed-in-tariffs for distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation are reduced or abolished in many jurisdictions, there is growing interest in increasing self-consumption to realise greater value from rooftop PV generation. However, deployment of PV on apartment buildings lags behind other residential deployment despite the potential advan...

Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming an increasingly attractive option to effectively and economically efficiently reduce global fossil fuel consumption as well as CO2 emissions associated with road transportation. In general, the grid provides the electricity required to charge an EV's battery. However, it could be worthwhile to consider EV chargi...

Demand Side Management (DSM¹) and in particular load shifting has considerable potential for facilitating renewables integration. At present, dispatchable loads in power systems are often operated to run late at night when electricity demand is lowest. However, they might also be managed to facilitate increasing levels of variable renewable generat...

Growing penetrations of distributed PV generation in low voltage electrical networks are raising new challenges for electricity industry operation. Voltage rise is a particular concern and new distributed voltage management techniques have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, a novel distributed voltage control method is presented. The m...

Australia has one of the highest penetrations of residential PV in the world and is projected to see substantially more deployment in coming years, with a growing proportion of this being coupled with battery energy storage (BES). Previous analysis of the implications of these residential distributed energy resources (DERs) has tended to focus on t...

Understanding of residential electricity demand has application in efficient building design, network planning and broader policy and regulation, as well as in planning the deployment of energy efficiency technologies and distributed energy resources with potential emissions reduction benefits and societal and household cost savings. Very few studi...

Distributed photovoltaics is playing a growing role in electricity industries around the world, while Battery Energy Storage Systems are falling in cost and starting to be deployed by energy consumers with photovoltaics. Apartment buildings offer an opportunity to apply central battery storage and shared solar generation to ag-gregated apartment an...