Insights
Notes on standalone power and WA’s energy transition
Occasional pieces written from the field. New articles are published on LinkedIn and listed here.
October 2026
What it takes to install a standalone power system in a remote WA community
Most people picture a standalone power system as a few solar panels, a battery and a generator. The hardware is the easy part. A few things that actually decide whether the job goes well:
- Logistics beat engineering. Sites are 850 to 1,100 km from the Malaga workshop at the end of unsealed roads that close when it rains. Forget something and it’s a week’s delay, not an afternoon’s.
- The site is someone’s home. Talk to residents and community leaders early, keep switchovers short, leave the place tidier than you found it.
- Weather dictates the programme. Pilbara heat, cyclone season and wet-season access windows set the schedule.
- Commissioning is where reliability is won. Protection settings, generator cycling and remote monitoring get more testing time than anything else.
- People make it work. Electricians and project managers happy to camp on site for weeks are rarer than good equipment.
Getting diesel out of remote communities is one of the cheapest wins in WA’s energy transition, and SPS is how it gets done.
Follow on LinkedIn for new articles as the remote community programme progresses.