Where every project finishes.
Strip away the panels, the turbines and the battery enclosures and every grid scale project is the same at its boundary. Generation is collected at medium voltage, stepped up through a main transformer in a project substation, and handed to the network through a switchyard or terminal station that the network service provider will eventually own or operate. Nothing exports until that interface is built, tested and accepted.
Our tracker shows how much of that work is live right now. Across Australia it holds 171 solar, wind, battery and pumped hydro projects that are past financial close and not yet operating.
- 35 committed, financial close reached and mobilising.
- 108 under construction.
- 28 in commissioning.
113 of those 171 are 100 MW or larger, which in practice means a high voltage connection with its own substation scope. 99 of them are batteries. By state, 53 sit in New South Wales, 43 in Queensland, 34 in Victoria, 23 in South Australia and 17 in Western Australia. Behind them, another 304 energy projects hold approval and have not yet reached financial close.
Primary and secondary are different trades.
Owners often talk about "the substation" as one package. The labour market does not see it that way, and hiring plans that treat it as one package tend to come unstuck.
Primary systems are the high voltage plant itself: power transformers, circuit breakers, disconnectors, instrument transformers, busbars, the earthing grid and the civil and structural work that carries them. Design sits under AS 2067 and the network's own standards. The people are HV design engineers, substation construction managers, HV electrical supervisors and the riggers and electricians who install the plant. This market is tight but legible. It overlaps with transmission and distribution construction, and candidates move between them.
Secondary systems are everything that watches, decides and reports. Protection relays and the schemes they run, control systems, SCADA and remote terminal units, communications and the IEC 61850 station bus, revenue metering, and the testing that proves it all behaves. The people are protection and control design engineers, SCADA and communications engineers, and secondary test and commissioning engineers. This market is much smaller, and it is the one that sets the date.
Why secondary systems set the date.
A substation can be physically complete, with plant installed and cabled, and still be weeks or months from energisation. The reasons are almost all secondary.
Protection settings have to be calculated, reviewed and accepted by the network. SCADA point lists have to be agreed with the network control centre and proven end to end. Interlocking and intertripping between the project substation and the network switchyard has to be tested with both parties present. Each of those steps needs a named engineer on the owner or contractor side who understands the scheme well enough to defend it and fix it on the day.
Batteries make this sharper. A solar or wind project spreads its build across many months of civil and mechanical work, so the substation has time to catch up. A battery is containerised plant on a pad, and the substation is often the longest single scope on site. With 99 batteries in the active set, the secondary systems engineer is regularly the person the whole program is waiting for.
The roles, as the market actually prices them.
Substation or HV package manager. Runs the substation scope across design, procurement, construction and handover. The best come from network utilities or tier one HV contractors and know how a network will review a design before it is submitted.
Protection and control design engineer. Designs the protection and control schemes and produces the settings. Usually trained inside a network or a specialist consultancy. Small pool, and almost nobody does it as a side skill.
SCADA and communications engineer. Owns the RTU and gateway configuration, the station network and the interface to the control centre. Increasingly overlaps with operational technology security, which pulls the same people in a second direction.
Secondary test and commissioning engineer. Injection testing, functional testing, end to end testing with the network, and the energisation itself. The role most often recruited too late, because it does not appear on the program until construction is nearly done.
HV commissioning and switching personnel. The authorised people who carry out switching and access. Authorisations are issued network by network, so a strong operator in one state can need weeks of induction before working in another, and the same applies across the Tasman.
What we would change.
Put a secondary systems lead on the owner side at design stage. The cheapest place to fix a protection philosophy is before the network has reviewed it. The most expensive is during commissioning, with the plant ready and the generator waiting.
Book the test and commissioning team when the substation contract is let, not when it is nearly built. The good ones are committed months ahead, and their availability, not the civil program, decides when energisation can happen.
Benchmark these roles against network utilities and specialist consultancies, not against construction electrical rates. A secondary systems engineer advertised at a site electrical rate is advertised to the wrong people, and the right people never see it.
Treat Australia and New Zealand as one market for these skills. Transpower and the New Zealand distribution companies run the same disciplines, many of the engineers have worked on both sides of the Tasman, and the authorisation gap is a planning problem rather than a barrier.
Every project ends at a substation. Hiring for that ending as late as most programs do is how a finished project sits dark.