Report at a glance

What is the report?

The goal of this project was to develop and test metrics for understanding and communicating the quality of network export services received by owners of rooftop solar power systems and other ‘distributed energy resources’ (DER).

Why isit important?

Distribution Network Service Providers (DNSPs) are responsible for connecting solar and other DERs to the network, setting limits on the size of systems and the amount of power that can be exported to the network, and managing the upstream capacity of the network. These are referred to as export services. DNSPs are required to consider export services as part of their core services and to integrate them into planning and regulatory proposals.

What did we do?

To facilitate the above, this project developed and tested a set of proposed performance metrics for understanding and communicating the quality of export services that customers are receiving or should expect to receive.

What difference will it make?

This project identified a series of applications of export service quality metrics, commonly referred to as use cases in this report. These are grouped into three main categories of:

1. Customer communication

2. Regulatory compliance

3. DNSP grid operation and planning

What's next?

Many metrics cannot currently be calculated across the full customer base and require more sophisticated data capture and analysis workflows to be developed over time. Ultimately a bottom-up understanding of curtailment and export service access is required. Other priority areas to support further development of export service metrics include:

• developing widely shared definitions of curtailment and export service concepts,

• establishing methods to overcome low LV data visibility and monitoring issues, and

• improving methods to estimate voltage-related curtailment.

While this project provides a solid foundation for export service metrics, more work is required to refine metric applications and strengthen industry experience in working with real network data applied to specific use cases, particularly regarding economic efficiency benchmarking.