How your home battery can help keep the grid stable and prices down

One Step Off The Grid

New data has shown that households solar batteries can be used to help run the national electricity grid, including to provide critical system security services and to respond to price signals to help push down costs for all consumers.

The data, supplied by Tesla, has been analysed in a knowledge sharing report published by the Australian Energy Market Operator, the first fruit from AEMO’s virtual power plant demonstrations – in this case a South Australia trial with Energy Locals, in a consortium with Tesla.

The Tesla Energy Locals VPP, which ultimately aims to include up to 50,000 households, is currently at phase two of its roll-out, with 1100 installed home energy systems comprising solar PV and a Tesla Powerwall battery.

As Energy Locals explains here, phase two is also about testing the systems operating together and their ability to generate enough to cheaply power an 320 Housing SA households whose properties are not suitable for the installation of a home energy system.

For AEMO – whose draft Integrated System Plan assumes significant uptake and participation of VPPs in the National Electricity Market between now and 2040 – the South Australia data offers its first real glimpse at how the coordination of distributed energy resources might work on the National Energy Market.

And as the AEMO report notes, the verdict is resoundingly positive. On one hand, it demonstrates that VPPs can benefit participating consumers by sharing the value earned through participating in FCAS or responding to energy market prices.

On there other, it shows that VPPs can benefit all other consumers by creating more competition to reduce prices and even potentially defer or displace the need for large-scale generation assets.

AEMO comes to these conclusions based on the data collected around five separate examples of the VPPs response to different events on the grid.

They include the October 2019 unexpected failure of the largest generating unit at the Kogan Creek power station, taking out 748MW of capacity and power system frequency down to 49.61 Hz, which is below the normal operating range.

On that occasion, the SA VPP detected this frequency excursion and responded immediately to inject power into the system and aid frequency recovery, as illustrated in Figure 1. …

To read the full story on RenewEconomy sister site One Step Off The Grid, click here…