Christopher Lund

There has been a conversation about developing electric vehicle industries in Indonesia and Australia. While many studies have identified the barriers and opportunities for developing the industry, limited studies have been conducted to estimate the demand and supply of critical minerals to produce electric vehicle batteries, particularly in Indonesia. This study investigates the future demand for lithium, nickel, and cobalt in Indonesia and Australia by considering multiple scenarios and technological options. The study highlights the importance of circular economic intervention, such as material substitution and recycling, to ensure a sustainable supply of these minerals. The result shows that the lithium, nickel, and cobalt reserves will be adequate for developing the domestic electric vehicle industry in Australia. The domestic production will consume between 0.4 per cent and 4.5 per cent of the available reserve. In Indonesia, domestic production will consume up to 1.2 per cent of the available nickel reserve. However, it will consume more than a quarter of cobalt reserve in a scenario where high-nickel cathode dominates the market. Indonesia might also need to import lithium. Therefore, the result emphasises the need to foster bilateral cooperation between Indonesia and Australia to develop a secure and resilient electric vehicle industry in the region. The study concludes that a multifaceted approach, including technological and policy advancement in sustainable consumption and production practices, is essential to mitigate climate change in these countries.

This paper proposes a model for energy sharing of interconnected microgrids (MGs), mainly where some MGs are owned by an entity, such as the government, which is the case study in Western Australia (WA). In the proposed model, MGs are able to trade energy among themselves when some of them have surplus generation, and others have lack of generations to meet their demand; however, they are obliged to pay for the use of distribution network, called network charge, and the share of network loss due to this energy transaction. In doing so, the network loss is taken into account and calculated through a power flow. The possibility of energy trading with the main grid is also considered through the wholesale electricity market. Considering the uncertainty of Photovoltaic (PV) generation and load involved, the decision making to inject or import energy to/from the main grid as well as to trade between MGs is obtained through a bi-level linear optimization. In the upper level, the distribution network operator intends to manage the energy exchange between MGs and energy trading with upstream grid, while in the lower level, each MG attempt to minimize its operational cost relating to PV and energy storage system (ESS). Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real project in Western Australia.