The purpose of this document is to provide an update to ARENA and the industry regarding the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Demonstration progress and lessons learnt.
Report extract
1.1 Background
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)’s Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Demonstrations trial began in July 2019 and in September 2019 it gained its first participant when Energy Locals, in a consortium with Tesla (SA VPP), registered to participate in the VPP Demonstrations. In February 2020, AGL registered as the second participant; however, at the time of publication, AEMO has not had the opportunity to review any operational data from AGL. AEMO will continue to work with a pipeline of interested VPP participants and expects more participants to join over the coming months.
Over the past year, there were many notable power system and market events that required large amounts of contingency Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) or energy only responses. Some of these events are analysed in this report to draw insights from the data on how the SA VPP is interacting with the power system. Note that Tesla has supplied data for this analysis.
Events requiring contingency FCAS were:
- 9 October 2019, Kogan Creek trip (Queensland generator).
- 16 November 2019, Victoria and South Australia regional separation.
- 10 December 2019, under frequency event.
Events requiring an energy response were:
- 30 April 2019, behaviour regarding a negative pricing event.
- 9-15 January 2020, behaviour over the course of a week.