What do you think about our plans to enable the distributed energy transition?

It is easy to forget that as recently as ten years ago it was extremely unusual to see a solar panel on a roof in South Australia. In 2018, it’s a very different picture! With one in four premises now with solar and a network that was originally designed for one-way flows of electricity, we have been thinking about how best to accommodate our customers’ changing needs. This includes ensuring the network has the capacity to continue to support the uptake of solar, as well as new technologies like residential battery storage systems.

Moving from centralised to de-centralised generation has its opportunities, but also its challenges. Our network was not designed to transport energy in two directions, and each part of the network has a limited capacity to accommodate the connection of distributed energy resources like solar and batteries before technical issues arise. As solar penetration in a local area begins to exceed capacity limits, customers can experience over-voltage at times of high export, causing inverters to trip off. Eventually, reverse energy flows in the middle of the day can become high enough to exceed the rating of transformers or other assets, which can cause localised power outages. These challenges can be exacerbated by ‘virtual power plants’ (where many individual batteries are aggregated under central control), which can cause very large swings in energy flows within the local network.

We want to ensure customers can continue to connect resources like solar and battery systems to the network, and are proposing work programs in 2020-2025 that will give us greater visibility of the network to ensure we can better manage these two-way energy flows. Check out Chapter 5 of the Draft Plan and let us know what you think about our approach!