Aurecon shares how connecting people, policy and innovation is the key to stabilising Western Australia’s renewable energy future.
The stakes are high for Western Australia’s (WA) energy transition. Investments are flowing into transmission, battery, wind, solar and hybrid generation – yet the technical, regulatory and commercial challenges are significant.
Shaped by the world’s largest isolated power system, vast distances between generation and demand, and its role as the nation’s resources powerhouse, WA’s rapid energy transition is getting in front of looming coal generation closures.
The renewable energy sector continues to navigate challenges slowing progress, including fragmented data and planning frameworks, limited grid capacity and a connection backlog, and growing uncertainty around system stability and asset performance.
The pace of change is rapid, and so too is the pace at which industry, technical requirements, regulation and policy have to move. One critical question looms large: How does WA build the transmission backbone fast enough to keep up with its decarbonisation ambitions?
Aligning policy, data and capital
As renewable investment accelerates, developers are grappling with a new question: What truly makes a project ‘bankable’ in WA’s fast-evolving energy landscape?
Beyond technical feasibility, project success increasingly depends on how policy, market mechanisms, including the WA’s Wholesale Electricity Market’s (WEM) capacity market, and data combine to support investor confidence.
Brenton Laws, Technical Director – Power Transmission and Distribution at Aurecon, says WEM’s structure is quite different to the National Electricity Market (NEM) which services Australia’s East Coast, with both pros and cons.
“For example, the capacity market helps manage and support reliability and provides strong revenue certainty for generators and batteries. In parallel, network connection presents uncertainty, with an evolving Applications and Queuing Policy and Critical Projects Framework to enable Western Power’s resources to advance the process,” Laws said.
“These challenges aren’t negative, but understanding and successfully navigating these unique processes is critical to project timing and success.”
Fowzi Dahhan, Lead Wind Engineer at Aurecon, highlights potential factors influencing wind project bankability.
“A well planned and executed wind monitoring strategy in the pre-construction stage is key to painting an accurate picture of the site wind conditions and achieving the confidence needed in the project yield to secure project financing. Conversely, the rapid pace of deployment means some developers are seeking certainty without investment in a quality monitoring campaign early on leading to project yield uncertainty,” Dahhan said.
“Another factor is proactive management of environmental and planning approvals. Impacts can arise from regulatory or legislative changes and developers need to be aware of the potential impacts changed consent conditions can have on project scope, schedule and potentially yield.”
“We can overcome these challenges by developing and supporting wind monitoring, as well as working alongside developers to identify critical path activities for projects.”
Building on this, Kelsea Dundon, Senior Engineer – Power Generation at Aurecon, says quantifying impacts is key to helping clients make informed choices, particularly across hard-to-abate heavy industry.
“It’s important that we understand how interconnected mining production systems are, and how those systems are changing. A significant amount of time and expenditure has gone into optimising existing systems, but decarbonisation means both displacing existing fossil generation and serving new load growth from renewable energy, requiring new thinking. Electrification is bringing large demand increases with big implications for renewable, storage, and load balancing,” Dundon said.
“Robust modelling that integrates energy generation and material movement are required, so operational performance, emissions and economics are assessed and optimised together, allowing resources businesses to make informed investment decisions. Planning on the energy supply side has to relate closely to the scale and speed at which operations can transform.”
Unblocking the sector bottlenecks
Strong investment in infrastructure will continue to be required to facilitate WA’s energy transition. Transmission capacity, grid connection and design standardisation are critical enablers, but also introduce short-term constraints.
Syed Sherazi, Technical Director – Power Transmission and Distribution at Aurecon, says aging transmission infrastructure and slow new transmission development have become the most critical bottlenecks to facilitating the rapid surge of high-density loads, from data centres, to major industrial facilities.
“While Western Power is focused on strengthening capacity and bringing renewable energy back to Perth’s metropolitan area load centres in the north, new transmission corridor developments are shifting the focus towards collaboration and connecting isolated, privately-operated transmission to enable power-sharing, waste reduction, and minimise duplicative upfront investment,” Sherazi said.
“We are seeing strong momentum to create a unified 330 kilovolt (kV) backbone in the Pilbara region. That would allow miners and network owners to share surplus energy and reduce the need for investment in standalone infrastructure.”
Sherazi has seen first-hand the importance of collaboration in the country’s rapid shift to clean energy.
“One key lesson from working on 330 kV projects in WA and 500 kV transmission projects on the east coast is the importance of timely decision-making on design and a scalable delivery approach for major projects, which help to control increasing capital costs and accelerate development,” Sherazi said.
“In regions where early design decisions are aligned with cost-effective solutions, supported by established supply chains and a skilled workforce, delivery can progress much faster, which I observed on my major projects in the Middle East. In WA, we are only now reaching this coordinated delivery level.”
Darren van Druten, Associate – Power Generation at Aurecon, shared that once the pathways for power are built, the focus shifts to how energy is generated, stored and managed across vast distances.
“We’ve seen extraordinary gains in scale and efficiency across generation and storage. Typical wind turbine ratings have doubled from around three megawatts (MW) to over six MW, and battery energy storage systems are now achieving energy densities up to 15 megawatt-hours (MWh) per 20-foot enclosure,” van Druten said.
“Scale changes everything. The technical challenges are only one part of the equation. A holistic approach is essential, integrating land, environment, and community considerations right from the start.”
The South West Interconnected System (SWIS) offers a glimpse of this shift already underway. New rules adding six hours of storage to the Reserve Capacity Scheme take effect this year, but WA’s uniquely vast network will require even more innovative thinking to keep pace.
“The SWIS, due to the expanse and fact it is not interconnected with any other regions means it needs to meet all system security requirements on its own. As renewables roll out, electrical system strength in locations along the network can be lacking, and so, innovative solutions must be developed to support inverter-based generators which are often developed far away from the load centres,” van Druten said.
“New thinking in how we design for reliability, security, resilience, and self-sufficiency will also be critical. For example, in remote regions, miners are developing some of the largest single-user islanded power systems in the world. These have been testbeds for innovation, showing how remote operations can run reliably on high levels of renewables without relying on the main grid.”
van Druten believes integrating renewables into traditionally fixed-load systems requires a deep understanding of flexibility and load behaviour.
Matching renewable energy generation to the specific load profile, exploring flexibility options on the load side, and reframing the question from ‘lowest cost of energy’ to ‘lowest cost of usable energy’ is critical.
Connecting policy, capital, innovation and people
Gina Dodd, Technical Director – Power Generation at Aurecon, says operational excellence depends on strong systems, data and people.
“Reliable performance monitoring and data systems are fundamental to optimising generation and meeting regulatory obligations. Having the right in-house expertise to interpret data, oversee contractors and respond quickly to faults makes all the difference in maintaining availability and yield,” Dodd said.
“Post-commissioning optimisation is changing rapidly. We’re now upgrading monitoring and control systems to meet evolving market/trade compliance and security requirements. The focus is on proactive replacement before failure, strategic operations and maintenance contracting.”
“We’re even focusing on repowering wind turbines with more efficient models to boost production. It’s about squeezing more performance and reliability, while keeping costs down.”
Dodd can see that global supply pressures also shape performance outcomes.
“Globally, the energy transition is happening fast, with countries like India and China driving costs down. But the sector is yet to complete its mission in affordability – partly because WA still depends on imported wind components and overseas installers. We are competing against other Australian states and countries for equipment, and increasing capacity of wind turbines has the potential to require investment to upgrade ports and roads,” Dodd said.
Managing risk and ensuring asset resilience comes down to a shared focus on data and performance and considering WA’s energy transition is a system-wide challenge that relies on coordination and communication as much as technology.
Tom Butler, Energy Practice Leader – Western Australia and Northern Territory, summarised the state’s overall challenge moving forward: “WA is a quiet achiever in the energy transition. For those in the sector, we know if we continue to connect policy, capital, innovation and people together, we will come out on top.”