<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/flexible-exports-vital-to-the-value-of-rooftop-pv-and-could-help-avoid-the-big-solar-button/>
"One of the best ways to avoid using the Big Solar Button, while also ensuring
consumers get the most out of their rooftop PV investment, is not yet available
to most of the nation’s households, despite having been rolled out in South
Australia with great success.
A new report by the Institute of Energy Economic and Financial Analysis (IEEFA)
has found that the “sluggish” and “patchwork” use of flexible rooftop solar
exports across Australia is costing a big chunk of new and existing solar
households tens of millions of dollars in lost income.
According to the report’s author, Dr Gabrielle Kuiper, that figure could
balloon to more than $200 million over the next three years as more solar
systems are installed, unless decisive action is taken to ensure the fast,
consistent implementation of flexible exports across the National Electricity
Market (NEM).
Flexible exports, as the name suggests, use smart inverter software to provide
much more flexibility over how a rooftop solar system operates, allowing
exports to vary throughout the day in response to communication from the
network operators.
In South Australia, where rooftop solar generation has on numerous occasions
met all of the state’s demand, flexible exports have been being rolled out
since 2023, giving households installing new systems the option to export up to
10kW – double the previous limit of 5 kW – in return for allowing the network
to lower those export limits “periodically” to manage grid stability.
To do this, the state’s distribution company, SA Power Networks, has developed
software to forecast the network’s hosting capacity 24 hours in advance, on a
five-minute basis, to safely and dynamically manage solar inflows of up to 10kW
per inverter.
Households installing solar that don’t want to take part in SA Power Networks’
Flexible Exports scheme can also choose that option, but are given a hard
export limit of 1.5kW.
For most of the time, customers signed up for flexible exports can export the
maximum amount that the network and their inverter can handle – up to 10kW per
phase. But when there’s too much solar for the network to handle, exports will
be automatically adjusted to match the network capacity.
So far, it’s been a great success – not least of all because it preserves
self-consumption for customers, meaning that even if the grid goes into “solar
shutdown” mode, system owners can still use their solar, they just can’t export
any energy back to the grid.
This means less likelihood that AEMO will need to hit the dreaded Big Solar
Button. And the evidence shows that, even in rooftop solar saturated South
Australia, very little network directed curtailment is being used."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
