Bremer Bay is a small seaside community on the south coast of Western Australia. The town was supplied for many years from Western Australia’s South West Interconnected System, the State’s main electricity network, which is predominantly powered by coal and gas fired generation.

Power quality in Bremer Bay suffered in recent years due to the age and length of the power line supplying the town from the nearest substation, approximately 170km distant. These factors made the line subject to frequent faults, which could take considerable time to locate and rectify. The result was poor network outage frequency and duration rates for the town. While numerous high cost network solutions were considered, Powercorp’s new high penetration wind/diesel technology system is now installed.

The Bremer Bay solution combines a single 600kW wind turbine with four 320kW Low Load Diesels (LLD^TM). Initially this system is operating as a stand-alone power station. The flexibility of the new technology would see the town reconnected to the main grid.

Bremer Bay could be reconnected to the main grid, with the LLD^TM systems supporting voltage levels full time via their inverters. The diesel units would only be utilised for peak load capacity or when a fault occurs on the network. Ultimately a PowerStore unit could be added to the Bremer Bay system to provide unparalleled levels of reliability.

The PowerStore flywheel energy storage system, allows continued supply of the load during and after a network disturbance. PowerStore also allows a higher penetration of renewable energy into these systems.