Johanna Bowyer’s scientific contributions

Currently in Australia there is a strong movement of communities seeking to live more sustainably. This is giving rise to the development of community owned and operated micro-grids which incorporate large amounts of renewable energy technology. While this is an emerging movement in Australia, there are still questions surrounding how these micro-grids can operate within the current regulatory and retail frameworks in Australia. This paper explores how the embedded network framework can be effectively applied to community-owned micro-grids. The objective of this paper is to explore the regulatory and retail arrangements for community-owned embedded networks through a case study of Narara Ecovillage. Working within the embedded network framework has complexities and challenges. To operate an embedded network, the embedded network operator (ENO) must take on the role of network service provider, local retailer and potentially embedded network manager (ENM). There are significant challenges associated with this such as following evolving Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) regulations, ensuring retail competition for customers, guaranteeing operational expenditure recovery and designing appropriate retail tariffs. Design considerations for the ENO tariffs include: recovering costs paid to the external retailer, recovering network operational expenditure, using tariff price signals to manage demand and ideally providing cheaper electricity for the customers than an external retailer would provide. This study designed and modelled potential tariff arrangements and concluded that the optimal tariff is a " Solar TOU " tariff which incentivizes customers to use more electricity during times of excess solar generation. Using the " Solar TOU " tariff, this case study could generate an annual operational profit, and provide a discount to the customers, when compared to a traditional external retailer tariff.