Developing renewable energy in Australia : developing regional advantage

Growing concern about climate change and global warming has resulted in an increasing emphasis on reducing carbon emissions. Renewable energy (RE) is emerging as a universal remedy to these problems. However, due to the congestion and heavy load on distribution networks in metropolitan areas, large scale RE facilities are unlikely to be built in urban settings. By contrast, the ‘wide open spaces’ and low population densities of regional areas are a considerable advantage for siting new RE installations. The large-scale deployment of RE plants in the regional Australia is a need and requirement for both environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. Regional Australia has enormous potentialities for RE, particularly in wind, solar and geothermal. However, due to the intermittent nature of RE sources and cost of energy generation, integration of large-scale RE with the grid introduces potential challenges that include power quality (PQ), energy-efficiency, cost-economic analysis with respect to greenhouse gas emission (GHG) and other socio-environmental factors. This chapter explores the benefits as well as the possible deployment and integration issues of renewable energy into the grid, when considering the development of a clean-energy system for a sustainable regional Australia. A hybrid model is presented to investigate the prospects of renewable energy, in particular, wind and solar energy in different locations across regional Australia. From simulation analysis, it is clearly evident that regional Australia has huge potential for large scale renewable energy which could feed energy into the national grid.