Battery rollout ahead in 2020

Power prices that fall during the day and rise at night, plus more storage, could help address the growing impact of rooftop solar on Western Australia’s southern power grid, with a new report listing 10 suburbs as potential candidates for community batteries.

The state government’s Distributed Energy Resources Roadmap, released on the weekend, said action was needed to address the danger of system stability issues that will arise as early as 2022.

Almost 29 per cent of households have rooftop solar, the report said.

“Cumulatively, this amounts to over a billion dollars of customer investment in electricity generation over the last decade,” the report said.

“This growth is expected to continue, with the CSIRO and AEMO forecasting uptake by residential customers will reach 50 per cent in the next 10 years.”

The increasing penetration of rooftop solar into the market presented a very high risk threat to the secure, safe and efficient operation of the network, the report said.

That was because of technical challenges managing voltage, the intermittency of solar, and the impact of big demand reductions during parts of the day, which threaten the viability of traditional generators.

Battery storage will be one key solution, handling rapid changes in voltage and holding power supply until it is most needed.

Western Power will roll-out community battery storage as soon as this year, the report said, prioritising network constrained areas such as Canning Vale, Dunsborough, Ellenbrook, Kalgoorlie, Leda, Parmelia, Port Kennedy, Singleton, Two Rocks, and Wanneroo.

Other changes to the grid will include communications functionality for inverters and introducing autonomous management to units of the network to optimise performance.

The second big recommendation was around power prices.

The report suggested a pilot where prices are raised at night, when demand was higher, and reduced in the day, when solar power was satisfying more demand.

It will help address an imbalance where solar users are effectively subsidised for their connection costs, which represent a bid portion of the cost to supply electricity but are not reflected in the bill.