By Jo Nova
It was supposed to be so ambitious, clean and green but turned out to be unreliable, noisy and hard to live with
Things are so bad, some farmers just want the old grid back, but the government won’t let them.
Back in 2022, Western Power was excited about their big plan to get rid of 23,000 kilometers of wire in regional Western Australia by forcing about 4,000 farmers off-grid and supplying them with solar panels and batteries. As of 2026, they have installed about 500 systems. Those farmers are the guinea pigs for the forced transition, whether they like it or not.
If renewable microgrids were going to work anywhere, it is surely in sunny vast first-world Western Australia, where renewable installations are only competing with a high-cost sparse long distance network.
But it hasn’t worked out as well as they hoped: Maintenance issues, outages plague WA standalone power systems
By Mark Bennett and Rosemary Murphy, ABC News Stateline, WA
“We probably used to get three or four power outages a year and we thought it’s going to be great, we’ll have power all year round,” Mr [Ben] Parsons said. “Since […]
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