Virtual Power Plant in South Australia – Stage 1 & 2 Reports

This report details AGL’s progress against the Stage 1 objectives of its 5 MW virtual power plant in South Australia (SA-VPP) project, and is submitted in partial fulfilment of AGL’s knowledge sharing obligations for the project’s funding partner, Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

When complete, the 5 MW virtual power plant (VPP) will consist of 1,000 distributed energy storage systems capable of dispatching more than 9 MWh of stored energy.

At its core, the SA-VPP project seeks to demonstrate the role of distributed ‘smart’ energy storage in enabling higher penetrations of renewables in the grid. This is particularly important in the context of the discussion around grid resilience and reliability in South Australia.

As older synchronous generation is retired, dispatchable storage becomes an increasingly important component in the generation mix. The VPP provides a powerful mechanism to achieving this storage capability whilst sharing the costs and benefits of that storage amongst all stakeholders, namely consumers, wholesale market participants, and network operators.

AGL has successfully completed Stage 1 of the three-stage project and at the time of writing had sold the 150 energy storage systems allocated to this stage three months ahead of schedule. As at the end of February, 47 energy storage systems had now been installed in customers’ homes and initial trials had demonstrated that the VPP can respond as expected to both planned and unplanned dispatch events, and has the potential to respond rapidly enough to reliably participate in the six second contingency Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) market.

A summary of Stage 1 achievements is provided below, followed by a brief review of projects highlights and key challenges.