The goal of this report is to investigate the reduction of local energy tariffs to incentivise charging from locally generated solar energy and selling energy to customers locally.
Report extract
Community-scale energy storage systems (100kW-1MW) may offer benefits over residential and grid-scale energy storage systems. Depending on the operation of the storage, benefits include reduced energy costs, improved solar power self-consumption, reduced import and export peak load, and increased network hosting capacity for non-dispatchable energy generation such as rooftop solar power generation. Community interest in shared storage may in part reflect a broader enthusiasm from customers for a sharing economy.
In Australia, there is widespread interest in community-scale storage with several trial projects underway. However, there are many open questions regarding how best to operate a shared storage asset. Here we have investigated the operation of a community-scale energy storage system with residential solar power generation under both business-as-usual energy tariffs as well as our proposed local energy tariffs, and evaluated the outcome in terms of the customer and network benefits listed above. We focused on scenarios where a community- scale battery is installed in a neighbourhood in close proximity to customers. Our results show that:
- Different electricity tariffs impact the operation of the community-scale storage, and thereby impact the potential benefits for customers, battery operators and networks.
- Reducing tariffs for the local exchange of energy to and from the storage can improve the local consumption of solar energy, thereby reducing import and export peak loads.
- community-scale storage increases hosting capacity compared to residential storage (of equivalent total capacity) i.e. customers will be able to install more and larger solar photovoltaic (PV) systems.