DI ST RIBUT E D GENERATION
JOURNEY TO NET ZERO well underway in regional WA Before Australia officially committed to a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and a world away from the COP26 conference in Scotland, the real work of reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions was already well underway.
F
our years ago, State Government-owned energy utility Horizon Power commenced a series of Distributed Energy Resource (DER) trials in the coastal GascoyneMidwest town of Carnarvon, approximately 890km north of Perth, Western Australia. Working with Reposit Power as its technology supplier and a team of researchers from Murdoch University, the regional and remote power provider is leading the way into a renewable energy future for remote microgrids with the learnings from its Carnarvon DER trials. Horizon Power faces both unique challenges and opportunities due to its 38 regional and remote microgrids in some of the most remote communities of Australia, and the inherent high cost of supplying electricity to these customers. “Like all utilities, we’re grappling with the challenge of accommodating more and more customer rooftop photovoltaic solar,” Horizon Power’s Future Technology and Innovation Manager, David Edwards, said. “This is both a technical and a business problem. As rooftop solar uptake changes the way our network operates, how do we adjust our business model to suit that?”
TRIAL HELPING TO ANALYSE RENEWABLES IMPACT ON THE NETWORK The Carnarvon trial was designed to resolve the technical, operational, and transitional barriers to a high penetration, distributed energy future, and build Horizon Power's expertise in distributed energy management. It demonstrated the extent to which Horizon Power could disconnect parts of the network for considerable periods of time,
68
UTILITY • FEBRUARY 2022
allowing some customers to be supplied solely from renewable energy. “We needed to understand how to manage the variability of renewable energy and its impact on the network, to ultimately increase renewable energy penetration across all of our remote networks,” Mr Edwards said. “Firstly, we gathered data to understand what was happening on the Carnarvon network, particularly in relation to customer solar systems, to quantify it in real-time. Secondly, we needed to analyse that data.” The trial recruited 116 Horizon Power customers in Carnarvon who already owned rooftop solar PV systems, with smart monitoring devices installed at each property to monitor the participants' energy consumption. Primarily, the task was to determine, at any given time of day, the amount of energy each customer rooftop solar system generated and consumed, as well as the amount of grid energy being drawn from the Carnarvon network by each participant. “We were gathering this data every five seconds, so we built a very detailed picture of exactly what was going on with those solar systems. We could see how cloud cover and the changes in sunlight were causing them to operate differently,” Mr Edwards said. “If the solar PV system was meeting a load at the home and suddenly the sun went behind a cloud, that manifested as a rapid transference of load over to the grid. We needed to understand how that was changing the network dynamics.
WWW.UTILITYMAGAZINE.COM.AU
