Australia Moves Forward with Transactive Energy

Last month saw an announcement of another Australian transactive energy trial, led by the Australian Renewable Energy Association (ARENA) and distributed energy resources (DER) management software specialist GreenSync. The transactive energy trials, which will be run alongside network operators United Energy and ActewAGL, will use GreenSync’s DER management software as a market platform. The trial marks another step in the evolution of DER management: from managing the physics of DER to also managing financial transactions. By trading grid services from their DER with local network companies, residential and commercial customers will benefit from direct financial incentives that GreenSync believes will help justify the investment in DER.

A Hotbed

Australia is a hotbed for transactive energy. There are numerous transactive energy trials underway in the country—certainly more per capita than anywhere else in the world. And there is good reason:

• At 15%, residential solar PV penetration is high.
• There is abundant sunshine in most cities.
• Critically, residential PV makes up a significant proportion of all PV, so is relatively important and gets plenty of regulatory attention.
• Network charges are high, due to the extraordinarily long distances power has to travel for relatively small numbers of customers.
• Blackouts are not uncommon—a recent heat wave in South Australia caused a surge in demand that could not be met by existing thermal generation led to the market operator to demand 100 MW of load be shed.

Future Resources

Energy Networks Australia (ENA) and Australia’s national science agency CSIRO co-wrote the recent Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap, which details a series of integrated measures that will expand customer choice, decrease emissions, lower costs, and improve security and reliability. ENA expects residential DER participation rates of 40% by 2027, with 29 GW of solar PV and 34 GWh of batteries. By 2050, Australian generation is expected to be virtually entirely renewable.

DER are regarded as important future resources that—when aggregated—will balance the networks, reward their owners, remove the need for green subsidies, and reduce the need for network infrastructure investments.

While the Australian market has some unique characteristics that have encouraged the early adoption of transactive energy, the continued falling costs and improving efficiency of solar PV and storage will make a viable economic case in more and more geographies. It is vital that vendors develop trustworthy, robust, and scalable platforms if transactive energy is to mature from its current embryonic state to a widely accepted market mechanism. Over the next few years, regulators, network operators, energy suppliers, and DER vendors will all be watching the Australian market with close interest.