SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock weighs in on dynamic (aka flexible) solar exports, which he believes are the future for home solar power in Australia – and around the world.
Transcript:
Hello from South Australia, where South Australia Power Networks, the local electricity network, have just announced that they’re going to start trials of something called dynamic solar export limiting.
Now, why should you care about this if you don’t live in South Australia? Because it’s coming to the rest of Australia – probably – that’s my educated opinion. Not that I’m that educated, but this is really, really important because it’s a paradigm shift in how we use and generate energy.
Solar energy has always been variable. In the morning it’s like this. If it’s a sunny day, it goes like this. In the middle of the day, it’s like this and then it comes down. Yeah, we get that. But everything else is going to become variable to deal with the variable renewables that are going to become pretty much a hundred percent of the grid in the next 10 years probably.
So that means how you use your energy has got to become more variable. And by that, I mean, you actually have to change how you use energy to integrate more solar into the grid. So, you don’t just switch stuff on and off and it goes on and off, and you don’t think about it. You have to think about when you’ll use it. Well, in fact you won’t have to think about it – a computer will think about it for you and switch these things on and off.
And the same with exporting to the grid. You just can’t bang all this lovely solar into the grid. Sometimes the grid doesn’t need it. So again, it won’t be your choice. In South Australia’s example, it will be SAPN and they’ll have a pretty smart computer deciding, “hey, you’re only allowed to export this, you’re only allowed to export that”. Everything’s going to go variable and controlled in a really sophisticated manner.
About SAPN’s Dynamic Solar Exports Trial
So, I just want to talk about this trial because it’s really, really interesting. How’s it going to work?
Well, they’re going to give you two options in certain suburbs of Adelaide. They’re going to say, if you want an export limit, you can either have a fixed one-and-a-half kilowatt export limit – really puny, you don’t want that. Or you can have 10 kilowatts.
Wow. That’s big. That’s twice what we can get now for most people in Adelaide.
But the caveat is every now and again, they can drop that right down to zero. So, it’s dynamic.
So, you’ve got a big computer up here – think about it, this is really sophisticated, this is like serious engineering. You’ve got a big computer up here that’s looking at potentially millions of solar systems in the future. And it’s looking at the grid and it’s monitoring in real time what’s happening in the grid. And it’s saying, “hey, that house can only export 1.5, that house can export 10 kilowatts”.
This is really cool. And I think it’s the future.
Solar Curtailment A Feature, Not A Bug
We’ve got to stop throwing our hands up in the air and saying, “Oh, this is terrible. We should be able to export all our solar energy!”
Look, if you’re off-grid, if you really hate all this stuff and you go off-grid, you’re wasting solar energy all the time. Because you’re not connected to a network, when your batteries are full you stop producing solar. So, it’s not a big deal.
As one of my favorite analysts, Jenny Chase from the UK says:
“Curtailment of solar is a feature, not a bug.”
So, all I want to say today is we’ve got to get into a new paradigm of not worrying about people externally controlling our solar and not worrying about curtailing our solar when it’s not useful to the grid.
And this SA Power Networks trial, I think is brilliant. And I think it’s the future. I think that’s what’s going to happen to solar systems not just all over Australia, but all over the world. We’re world leaders in this.
But what you care about if you’ve got a solar system is what does dynamic export limiting mean for your bottom line if you sign up for it, because it is optional at the moment.
Well, I don’t know. It depends how you use energy, but I’m pretty confident that overall you’ll be better off, because most of the time you’ll be able to export more surplus into the grid.
Next, you should be better off, especially if you’re savvy about how you use your energy.
Don’t buy a dumb solar system, buy a smart solar system that has the smarts there to not, well, you don’t need the smarts not to export to the grid because SAPN will handle that for you, but a smart system that will manage your demand. It will switch stuff on and off at the right time and make intelligent decisions about when to use your electricity. Take it to the bank, you’ll be better off with dynamic export limiting if you do that.
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So, apart from Finn Peacock now being an agent for the electricity companies, why do the governments not simply supply each household with sufficient behind the meter battery storage, to
1) stop exports from household rooftop photovoltaic systems to electricity grids, and,
2) stop peaks and troughs in demand, so that when the clean electricity (which should be the only electricty supplied to each of the grids) exceeds demand, it is soaked up by the household batteries, and, when the clean electricity is insufficient to meet demand, the power is drawn from the batteries?
It is interesting timing; the above article, being published on the same day that the ABC has published a news report about the thousands of millions of taxpayers’ dollars, that are being given to the fossil fuel companies.
Bret,
I found the earlier ABC article you referred to here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-26/scott-morrison-climate-change-fossil-fuel-subsidies-net-zero/100094506
In THAT article I can see that Matt Canavan ever so slightly retreats from his earlier July 2020 position that the fossil fuel industry received NO ‘subsidies’ AT ALL. See: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-29/fact-check-matt-canavan-fossil-fuel-industry-subsidies/12496310
However, at this stage I’m far more interested in simply staying alive, rather than debating what level of national and personal beggary we might eventually reach, or how fast or slow we get to that point.beforehand.
There’s some suggestive evidence that the level of both earthquakes and volcanoes is increasing, although every active volcano fluctuate between ‘all hell breaking loose’ and ‘nothing seemingly happening’ states, so the jury is maybe still out on that one with some people.
Either way, it seems certain that ocean levels will rise, and if you combine that with the possibility of even a ‘normal’ rate of volcano eruptions, or a future increase in extreme weather events, it seems to me that the current fad for ‘canal developments’ on reclaimed mud-flats may not be the wisest of property investment choices..
Finn, have you written any articles on comparing these smart systems to manage your home usage? We always manually change our behaviour and have timers on things like hot water but a bit more automation would certainly help.
Wayne,
I’m not so sure that a ‘smart’ system would prove worthwhile for many households overall. It’s a while since I looked at that for myself, but it seemed to me that the added benefits – compared to those from simply time-shifting consumption via timers, doing things at different times etc – aren’t really worth the outlays needed
There’s a lot of variables involved – though
Hey maybe we are looking at this from the wrong point of view. Maybe its time the large power stations started limiting their electrical input into the grid.
Its much easier to monitor one input that thousands especially when that one input causes so much pollution.
I’ve often thought that! Good luck getting any traction with it though.
In five years time, some families will have two EV cars with vehicle to home ability. They will be able to go off grid simply by taking only one car at a time out of the garage. They could use rooftop solar on sunny days and roadside chargers after a cloudy spell. Volkswagen seems to be thinking along such lines.
Do you really believe that the AEMO is not going to impose a fee of $10 per consumed kWh for battery powered cars, with the consumption retrieved from the cars’ computers?
I can’t see that happening.
In principle, I see the sense in this. I would prefer it if it was a last resort after all community-located and grid-scale “big” batteries were fully charged, and all possible water pumped uphill for later release, but I suppose that’s a bit too much to hope for. This is, after all, an Australian Grid.
However, one thing I have never seen explained anywhere is precisely what “curtailment” means for the home owner. It is always described as “switching off your inverter”. That, in turn, implies that the homeowner will be paying for supply from the grid which would otherwise have been satisfied from the solar system. My response (and I suspect that of most other people) is words to the effect of “farnarkle that!”.
I keep hoping to see an explanation which goes something like, “no, no, no, that’s just some dumb media-twerp’s simplistic description – what actually happens is that your inverter is told it can’t export to the grid for the time being. Any demand in your home will still be satisfied, first, by your solar system and then by drawing from the grid.”
Does anyone happen to know whether the solution is smart or dumb?
And, in a country that is not ruled by tyrannical neanderthals;
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/28/german-solar-generates-40-gw-for-the-first-time/
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“More than 40 gigawatts of solar power for the first time!” tweeted, yesterday, Bruno Burger, head of energy charts at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE.
The record result, of 40.7 GW, was achieved on April 27, at 1 p.m.
The favorable weather situation, with a sunny sky and low temperatures, had previously set new photovoltaic generation records on Friday and also at the weekend. According to German power provider Eon, a total of around 515 million kilowatt-hours of solar power were fed into the grid on Saturday and Sunday, which is more than ever for an April weekend.
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I believe that Germany has about three times the population of Australia, so, the equivalent, if Australia would become a civilised country, would be about 13GW of photovoltaic electricity generation for Australia.
But, this is Australia, where the members of the feral parliament still have to come down, out of the trees, and learn to walk upright, on the ground.
Hi Brett
Germany hitting 40 gigs of solar generation is definitely an event worth noting. I’ll just request you keep quotes from articles down to the most relevant sentence or two. We don’t want the Germans cranky with us.
Where can community batteries fit into future systems to maximise local solar production and to reduce community and household reliance on centrally produced power. Couldn’t community batteries increase the amount of revenue that stays within a community rather than have people having to pay for electricity to huge corporations outside the local area?