Efficient Seasonal Time of Use Feed-in Tariff for Residential Rooftop Solar Panels in Australian Electricity Market

摘要

The geographical area of Australia is extremely large and it is the sixth largest country in the world, and overall its population is very low (Countries of the world by area). Power distribution companies in Australia in particular face severe challenges of supply electricity in the regional areas as the network area to be supplied can be exceptionally high and a number of customers can be extremely low. Utilities are supplying electricity to the consumer irrespective of the location, while the cost of supply of electricity to different locations can be widely different. Therefore, the utility can be disadvantaged by the low density of consumer spread over wide areas. Another disadvantage to the utility is that the transmission and distribution network which is supplying a large area is at the constant threat of severe weather conditions and can cause high network maintenance costs. For example, in some cases, a power company may need to supply isolated communities with less than 100 people (Overview of tariff structure statement). This has resulted in high electricity bills in locations where customer density is low, or it resulted in the need of high subsidy from state government (Hayat et al. 2016).