Project will look at dealing with grid congestion to ensure market participants are fairly recompensed
A project underway in South Australia and Victoria will trial a flexible connection for solar PV customers using artificial intelligence (AI). The A$4.84 million project will examine a flexible connection option for residential rooftop solar PV customers so that they are not restricted by static export options in congested areas. The 12-month trial will involve up to 600 participants with rooftop solar installed on their houses across the two states that already have high penetration. The technology being trialled will receive signals from the distribution network and adjust flow export limits from the participants’ panels every five minutes, enabling the distributor to remove a five kilowatt (kW) cap on the power households can sell back to the grid. Two different configurations will be tested: one entailing a retrofit with energy management system device from SwitchDin, an Australian technology company, paired with a compatible inverter. The other configuration will use built-in integration within inverters purchased by participants. Project manager Bryn Williams, from SA Power Networks, says without the new process new households adding solar panels might be stopped from exporting to the grid. “The level of solar on the grid in South Australia is increasing daily. The trial will target some areas that are particularly congested, where we might soon have to consider imposing zero-export limits on new installations, as is happening already in other states like Victoria,” says Williams. This inability to export surplus electricity back to the grid risks creating an inequitable system, where early adopters essentially max out the available grid capacity. This would lead to limitations on later adopters and a reduction of the economic benefits from installing rooftop PV. It also risks passing on the cost to upgrade the network to all customers irrespective of whether the household has solar PV installed. The trial will target new customers wishing to connect in areas where the grid is already at capacity and otherwise be facing a zero or near-zero static export limit. It will seek to quantify the value a flexible export capacity can bring these customers. The field trial phase is set to begin in mid-2021. If successful, Williams says SA Power Networks plans to offer all new residential solar PV customers a flexible connection option “as standard” from late 2022. It also has the ability to be rolled out nationally if successful and distributors are working to establish technical standards to this end. In turn, this could potentially double the amount of renewable energy the network can accommodate over the next five years. “This capability to provide flexible export limits or ‘dynamic operating envelopes’ is fundamental to integrating high levels of [distributed energy resources] with the network,” Williams adds. “We’ve proved the concept through our ongoing trial with Tesla’s South Australian virtual power plant (VPP), and the upcoming trial is about extending that to passive solar PV.” The A$64.17 million Tesla trial built a network of up to 50,000 solar installations and the US storage company’s Powerwall home battery systems to create the world’s largest virtual power plant. The project uses AI to optimise power supply and predict demand peaks to provide stability to the grid. •
TEXT
Katie Kouchakji
PHOTO
Ross Jones