Rooftop Solar–From renewable champions to energy network pariahs

In what should be a success story for the transition to renewables, distributed solar from rooftops around Australia regularly exceeds 30% of the energy in the NEM – National Electricity Market.

But instead of popping the champagne corks in celebration, rooftop solar owners are facing a number of counter-intuitive measures. In a recent pronouncement, AEMO the Australian Energy Market Operator has announced that it wants the power to reach into the garages of solar equipped homes and turn off the inverters, “curtailing” energy outputs to the grid to maintain stability. Not only does this mean that energy produced on rooftops will be lost to the grid entirely on those occasions, but also that there will be no return for Feed-In-Tariff – FIT during any curtailment period.

FIT’s have been on a diminishing curve for some time, falling from the heady values of say 20 cents/KwH some years ago to the now paltry and common 5 Cents/KwH. This is another consequence of high take-up of rooftop solar, and its impact on the wholesale energy price – retailers cannot afford to offer customers more than it costs to purchase from the NEM.

On another front, DNSP’s – Distributed Network Service Providers who sit between electricity generators and retail electricity customers have confronted the problem of high and variable generation output from mainly residential rooftops by coming up with the novel idea of implementing Export Charges from next year, whereby electricity customers will have to pay a fee to export solar to the grid over and above a relatively low level.

So as a group, solar home owners, despite being a significant contributor to the energy mix in the grid, have less and less agency in how their energy is used, and diminishing returns or penalties for what they provide. There needs to be a switch in emphasis.

Batteries are an obvious place to start. The question is – at what scale?

At a grid scale, large battery installations of say 500 MWH can be used to assist with stabilizing the energy flows form large scale generators such as wind farms, or large scale commercial solar, or for that matter the last of the fossil generators.

Neighbourhood scale batteries around the 5 MWH size can be used to facilitate these same smoothing operations at the local level – supporting 1000 to 2000 homes through storage of those pesky peaks in power output, and by bringing like-minded groups together in novel power sharing arrangements, in a way that gives back some of that missing agency and control of their valuable contributions to the grid.

The term Community Batteries has in a sense been hijacked by big retailers, DNSP’s, and in a sense by government. They are generally around the 0.5 MWH size which depending on configuration can be meaningful to key community infrastructure like halls, community centres, and other social enterprises. At this scale however, they are never going to reverse the trends outlined above.

As a group trying to establish a new paradigm in Community Energy, we see a hunger from our community constituents to regain agency over their energy production, but also a willingness to make a meaningful contribution to the Energy Transition.

What we don’t see unfortunately, is any apparent will from governments to enable groups like ours in formulating new ways of putting the word “Community” back into battery projects.

A good example of this is the recent announcements of outcomes for ARENA – Australian Renewable Energy Agency grant funding in the Community Batteries for Household Solar program Round 1. Grant applicants/recipients were split into 2 classes – DNSP’s (Stream A), and Non-DNSP’s (Stream B). Neighbourhood Battery proponents such as ours fall into the Non-DNSP category. It was notable that there was not a single identifiable community group recipient in the Stream B funding pool – this category being dominated by established electrical retailers and even an entity such as Shell Energy.

ARENA has rigorous merit assessment processes, and it may well be that no community group could put forward a sufficiently convincing case about their ability to manage a project worth millions of dollars. In any case, the outcomes are perpetuating the “big power” hold over energy resources, particularly as they relate to energy generated within communities. Battery assets awarded under grant schemes to retail entities (and DNSP’s for that matter) act as value multipliers enriching those commercial interests.

For DNSP’s, every dollar spent on battery installations (regardless of how funded) is a dollar not required to be spent on poles and wires upgrades. Batteries may be a cost effective trade off in this respect, but how those assets are deployed, and whether there is any community benefit beyond network reliability remains to be seen.

It is completely apparent that to attain the full value that can be gained from Neighbourhood Batteries, they need to be controlled by the community, with strategic and sympathetic partnerships from Local Government, and relevant service providers.

Support our battery proposal by visiting our website and registering your interest. Let your friends and like-minded individuals know about our project as well. Demonstrable community engagement is important in convincing entities like local government, and grant funders to cooperate and support us.

https://communitypowershare.org