Following the DEIP DER Market Integration Trials Summary Report released in 2022, this second report presents aggregated findings from the last 12-months across AEMO’s Project EDGE, Western Power’s Project Symphony, Evoenergy’s Project Converge and Ausgrid’s Project Edith. The report is broken into four chapters — Consumers, Traders, Network Limits and Network Support and Data Exchange — sharing the latest opportunities and challenges in distributed energy resources (DER) integration.
Report extract
As uptake of consumer energy resources (CER) continues to increase in Australia, we see growth in new energy products such as virtual power plants (VPP), electric vehicle smart charging offers, integrated hardware and retail bundles, and the early participation of CER in energy markets.
Novel policies and frameworks are being developed in which CER can operate safely and efficiently within the limits of the system, such as flexible exports, in addition to new ways to incentivise efficient usage of the network through various tariff trials:
- At higher levels of CER uptake, numerous existing and emerging methods of operating end-to-end energy solutions will need to improve:
- Trustworthy entities must provide consumers with compelling and clear offerings for new energy products and services. On behalf of customers, traders will need to integrate a range of data sources and operate or signal CER in increasingly sophisticated ways. Networks as Distribution System Operators (DSOs) will require greater visibility of real-time network energy flows, along with more sophisticated tools and incentives for the efficient, secure, and reliable management of energy flows. Methods of exchanging data between a large and diverse set of actors will need to be iteratively rolled out as CER infrastructure grows and integration offerings mature.