A new three-year project allowing residential solar and batteries to trade electricity and grid services in Victoria, Australia, is aimed at creating a replicable model marketplace that could be widely expanded across the country.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said today that Project EDGE (Energy Demand and Generation Exchange) has been launched in partnership with electricity retail company Mondo Power and network operator AusNet Services. According to the national Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which will financially support AEMO in rolling out the trial, initially involving about 50 residential customers in the Hume region of north east Victoria, it will be scaled up to enrol 1,000 customers, including commercial and industrial (C&I) as well as residential. AEMO said that the trial will include a minimum of 10MW of distributed energy resources (DER).
The trial will run on its own marketplace platform, where the capabilities and capacities of solar and batteries and other DER such as electric vehicles (EVs), EV chargers and smart meters can be aggregated. These aggregated resources will be able to deliver network support services at wholesale and local levels. The state of Victoria recently extended a subsidy programme offering rebates for purchases of rooftop solar and home batteries.
At present, large-scale facilities are able to participate in such opportunities via the National Electricity Market (NEM). However, as AEMO pointed out in a press release and accompanying fact sheet, the NEM was originally designed to facilitate one-way trade and flow of electricity from large centralised generators to consumers. The Project EDGE trial is a first attempt to create a marketplace based on a two-way flow instead.
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