United Energy Demand Response – Final Project Performance

This document is the Final Project Performance Report of the United Energy Demand Response Project for the ARENA Advancing Renewables Programme – Demand Response programme (RB006). It fulfils an obligation under the Knowledge Sharing Plan to provide an update on the status of the delivery of the Dynamic Voltage Management System rollout project including sharing of results and lessons learnt.

United Energy has delivered the demand response services through the use of remote-controlled voltage reduction at 47 zone substations initiated from its Network Control Centre. This service uses the existing fleet of smart meters deployed across the distribution network to provide time-lagged customer voltage data from all connected smart meters to enable reductions in voltage while maintaining voltage compliance during the demand response event. To do this, the voltage across the network can be reduced by 3% on average to deliver at least 30MW of demand response within 10 minutes when called upon, sustained over a 4-hour period between 10am and 10pm on business days.

Due to the mathematical relationship between voltage and real power, as demand increases, the level of demand response provided by United Energy will also automatically increase. Previous use of this method of demand response always had some level of risk in that it could not be guaranteed that customer voltages did not fall below the stipulated regulated limits during the voltage reduction period, and this elevated the risk of customer claims from appliance damage. This risk has now been addressed with United Energy completion of an advanced technique using smart meters to implement demand response using voltage reduction, without deteriorating our regulatory voltage compliance. This technique uses actual time-lagged voltage information (by 25-60 minutes) from the entire fleet of smart meters (AMI) to provide the feedback loop to inform and set boundaries on the voltage reduction control system.