Arena trial taps 20MW of flexible demand from commercial refrigeration

Enel X Australia has been awarded $3.7 million from the Australian government to launch a demonstrator project that will use commercial refrigeration systems across Australia to provide flexible demand to the grid.

Flexible demand describes the coordinated orchestration of electrical load in response to generation, network, or market signals – basically easing pressure on the grid during periods of high demand by shifting usage to non-peak times.

Acting on behalf of the Australian government, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will invest $3.7 million in Enel X Australia’s plan to recruit 440 commercial refrigeration facilities to deliver flexible demand capacity to support Australia’s renewable energy transition.

Enel X predicts that commercial refrigeration facilities across supermarket, grocery, beverage, convenience, and last-mile logistics boast an estimated 500MW of potential flexible demand across Australia’s National Electricity Market.

Refrigeration, like other forms of heating and cooling, serves as a potentially valuable source of flexible demand due to the thermal mass of facilities that are able to maintain temperatures even when refrigerators and chillers are ramped down.

As such, even small changes to power usage in commercial refrigeration could have a large impact when aggregated to scale, while resulting in no noticeable change for users or impact on product quality.

Enel X’s ‘Unlocking Flexible Demand in the Commercial Refrigeration Sector’ program will therefore aggregate more than 20MW of flexible demand from businesses across the National Electricity Market.

These businesses will therefore participate in Enel X’s virtual power plant (VPP) and provide services to support Australia’s electricity system – and will be financially rewarded in turn.

As the amount of variable renewable energy sources on Australia’s grid increase – especially in advance of the large-scale battery deployment on the horizon – solutions are needed to balance out supply and demand. Enel X hopes that flexible demand solutions can complement storage technologies to reduce the overall cost of energy.

“The energy market needs new ways to balance renewables, and businesses need new ways to reduce energy costs,” said Jeff Renaud, managing director of Enel X APAC.

“With ARENA’s support, we will prove that small-scale refrigeration systems, when plugged into a virtual power plant, can make a large-scale contribution to the renewable energy transition.”

Enel X, the energy storage and services business of Italy’s energy company Enel, has already engaged with an unnamed “Tier 1 Grocery chain” as an initial supermarket partner for the flexible demand program. A 20-store pilot will eventually be expanded to up to 250 stores participating in the VPP.

Leading temperature-controlled logistics company Lineage Logistics will also take part in the project, offering up 13 refrigerated warehouse sites to participate in the VPP.

“Our electricity grid is changing, and a more variable supply requires more flexible demand,” said Darren Miller, ARENA CEO.

“Commercial refrigeration can unlock this opportunity at a material scale, so we’re excited to see the Enel X project rolled out across Australian supermarkets and other businesses with refrigeration.

‘We want to see projects like this demonstrate the benefits of flexible demand – to individual electricity users and all users via a more efficient grid.”