Rosemary Lyster | Extreme weather events join death and taxes as life's certainties

When extreme weather events (EWE) hit Australia's electricity grid the lights go out. The widespread loss of electricity - essentially a disaster within a disaster - can force a whole region to its knees. From rancid food to emergency-room nightmares, communities take a punch when the lights go out.

Worse still, telecommunications fail and contact with everyone - most importantly emergency services - is lost. A whole state can lose power such as when tornadoes hit the transmission lines in South Australia in 2016. Aging power grids leave us more susceptible to risks like these. It really shouldn't be this way.

Since the 2009 Victorian bushfires, floods, fires and cyclones have wreaked havoc on our electricity infrastructure, with increased frequency and intensity, and the climate science is in. Australia is highly vulnerable. We've already warmed 1.4° C and historical baselines for the frequency of EWEs have literally been washed away.

Something else is in - the Budget 2022-23. The news about electricity prices is grim. They are likely to be up 20 per cent by December and 56 per cent within 18 months. The increase in prices is largely being linked to the war in Ukraine and the global demand for gas and coal, yet these aren't the only electricity costs we should be focusing on. The impacts of EWEs on the grid impose enormous costs and these have been and will continue to be passed on to us as consumers.

What is very surprising is that there is no legal obligation on the owners and operators of the grid to invest in building resilience to climate-induced EWEs. Resilience is not even an objective of the National Electricity Law, although reliability and security of supply are. Grid reliability focuses on power failures of shorter duration affecting smaller regions.

Resilience, on the other hand, deals with a network's ability to keep the lights on following high impact disruptive events, like EWEs. The evidence is that, between 2009-2018, only 4.1 per cent of power blackouts were caused by security of supply issues and 0.3 per cent by reliability issues. 95.6 per cent were caused by damage to infrastructure caused by storms or bushfires.

A recent review of the resilience of Victoria's distribution networks (the poles and wires) says there's an urgent need for reform. It made a number of suggestions like requiring utilities to immediately develop a Network Resilience Strategy.

In response, the Australian Energy Regulator, which regulates utilities, says it needs to be convinced that it's better to invest in resilience upfront rather than pay the costs to repair the damage. Either way, these costs will be passed on to consumers, so we need to be prepared for that.

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The other major resilience issue is the massive rollout of renewable energy technologies and transmission in Renewable Energy Zones (REZs) in rural and remote areas across the country.

The Australian government has announced that 10,000kms of transmission lines need to be built and it has established the 'Rewiring the Nation' program to facilitate construction. The Budget 2022-23 commits $90.5 million to it.

This is happening to help meet Australia's Paris Agreement target of 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050. One would expect that, in deciding exactly where to situate this new grid infrastructure, the impacts of EWEs would be factored in.

After all, the Electricity Sector Climate Information (ESCI) project, which cost the Australian government $6.1 million, provides national climate datasets for the sector, including on: maximum and minimum temperatures, wind speeds, bushfire conditions, solar radiation, rainfall and dam inflows. The data is produced at a scale of 1.5-12 km across the National Electricity Market, at sub-daily intervals, to the year 2100. Maps, summary tables and time series plots, including guidance material is all available.

Very surprisingly the draft Network Infrastructure Strategy for the NSW REZs, released today on October 28, makes no mention of climate change or resilience to it, EWEs, the ESCI or adaptation. This does not bode well for such extensive investments.

Resilience should be front and centre of decision-making and network planning.

There is no 'silver bullet' solution to building electricity infrastructure resilience, and protecting the power grid from EWEs is not a job that will be completed quickly or easily in any country. Strictly speaking, it will never be completed at all. Because climate change is a dynamic process and because our knowledge and technology will continually evolve, the pursuit of climate resilience is an ongoing task.

What is urgently needed, however, is regulation to require the existing and future grid owners and operators to invest in resilience. Too much is at stake to leave this to their own discretion.