DISTRIBUTED GENERATION
POWERING
AHEAD WITH COMMUNITY BATTERIES Community batteries are perhaps the missing size option in Australia’s energy storage toolkit. Filling a niche between residential and utility-scale batteries, community batteries empower Australian communities to make the most of a growing base of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar. To understand the big-picture obstacles faced by community batteries, we spoke with leading experts from the Australian National University’s Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program (BSGIP), Project Lead Dr Marnie Shaw and Research Fellow Dr Hedda Ransan-Cooper.
T
he twenty-year outlook on Australia’s energy future will continue to star decentralised renewable resources, like rooftop solar, which are predicted to increase by at least 200 per cent by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). For Australia to get the most out of our distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar, researchers are pointing to the critical potential of battery storage for buffering energy output.
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Living between the scales of utility and household scale batteries, community batteries offer energy storage for around 100 households, with power capacities up to 5MW. They might be anywhere between the sizes of a refrigerator and a shipping container, but don’t rule out the imprint that community batteries might have on Australia’s energy future. Leading Australian researchers have pointed out that community batteries promote local energy stability and resilience, they are cheaper when compared to deploying single-household batteries, and they boost local hosting
capacity, increasing the amount of renewables that can be installed across our neighbourhoods. Australia’s trial community batteries include 13 operational units installed by WA’s Western Power, as well as an emerging and collaborative project to install the first community battery in Melbourne’s CBD, led by Yarra Energy Foundation (YEF). While trial projects around Australia are promising, researchers from the Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program (BSGIP) have detailed key regulatory and social hurdles that prevent community batteries from really taking off.
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