Not everyone hates Ausgrid’s proposal to encourage and manage rooftop solar-batteries

Not everyone is against network company Ausgrid’s idea to test whether a network could, or should, facilitate the construction of rooftop solar and manage PV exports, but it should also be said that not all of those in support put deep consideration into the reasons why. 

Ausgrid wants to use the Australian Energy Regulator’s (AER) innovation sandbox to allow it to install big batteries in two Sydney areas and run a five-year trial of in-house management of rooftop solar flows into the grid.

It is proposing to pay slightly higher feed-in tariffs and a dividend to all households and businesses in the two catchment areas, Mascot-Botany and Channhaven, and be a solar-owner-of-last-resort for households and businesses that don’t want to install solar on their rooftops. 

The idea – which blurs the boundaries that define the roles of networks on one hand and generators and retailers on the other – has left many Australian energy participants aghast. They oppose the very idea of allowing a regulated monopoly into the competitive electricity market.

Of the 36 submissions published on the Energy Innovation Toolkit website that weren’t from either Ausgrid or its project partner UNSW, 14 were for the concept. 

That comes with a caveat, because six of those submissions were from state and federal politicians from across the Liberal-Labor spectrum, and the Property Council of Australia, who all used the same template letter.

Those opposed are focused on the ramifications of allowing a distributed network service provider (DNSP) to edge further into competitive markets, and the number of rules Ausgrid is asking to be sidelined so it can do so.

But those for the project are hoping the trial can show how to allow the apartment-centric city to benefit from rooftop solar.

The City of Sydney is for the project, saying it’s unaware of any other ready-to-deploy proposal that might accelerate local solar and storage in urban areas at a speed or scale equivalent to the Ausgrid trial.

Ausgrid is proposing to install 130 megawatt hours (MWh) of storage in both areas. 

But the council does ask that data from the trial, particularly the spatial mapping Ausgrid plans to do to work out where best to put batteries and solar, be publicly available, and that the DNSP carefully considers the equity implications of how it plans to distribute the benefits from the trial. 

The proposal is in-sync with a vision already put forward by the Committee for Sydney in June, which pitched Sydney as an urban renewable energy zone (REZ) – if only it could figure out how to convince the remaining apartment and commercial building owners to install solar and batteries. 

“Sydney accounts for ~38–45 per cent of NSW demand,” it said in the submission. “Sydney could technically meet up to 75 per cent of annual needs with rooftop PV plus batteries, but the benefits are unevenly distributed today—making equity-focused trials the fastest path to fair, affordable decarbonisation.”

In its view, the Ausgrid trial will not only bring the benefits of rooftop solar to renters, apartments, low-income households and businesses with no rooftops or capital, but will also provide evidence of how a suburb-wide REZ might work. 

It wasn’t keen on a strict no-opt-out stance, saying default participation with “robust protections” to balance the need to win hearts and minds to a VPP with the need to learn quickly. 

The urgency of pushing Australia’s energy transition further, faster was picked up by Rewiring Australia, which says given the need for practical neighbourhood solutions to better use rooftop solar, this is a gap networks can fill. 

“There is a role for network-owned storage assets that can be developed and managed directly in the interests of developing operational capability, while carefully limiting and accounting for any expansion of the regulated asset base,” it says. 

It does say that a measure of success should be how well the trial incentivises new rooftop solar installations rather than how much Ausgrid can end up owning. 

Regional New South Wales (NSW) DNSP Essential Energy was the only network with a public submission, at the time of publishing. It’s deeply in favour of the proposal, partly because it’s keen to do something similar. 

“The learnings from this trial will be highly transferable to the regional and rural settings that Essential Energy serves, where demand profiles, customer density and network topology differ from metropolitan areas, yet the need to integrate CER efficiently are the same,” its submission says.

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