Ausgrid has big plans for community batteries across its network. With 10 smaller community batteries already in place and eight larger battery installations in the works, the largest electricity distributor on Australia’s east coast is rapidly moving into energy storage. “Ausgrid is extending what has historically been seen to be a network to include storage,” says Ausgrid CEO Marc England. “It’s important to us that we provide this platform. Just like the networks historically with poles, wires, substations, transformers, we provide this platform that allows competition to happen.”
Because government incentives have emphasised solar panels over batteries, the grid is long on solar power and short on storage. Battery storage is urgently needed to help manage the excess renewable energy produced during the day, when household demand is low, and store the energy for the evening peak.
The network’s new “transformational collaboration” with energy retailers Origin and EnergyAustralia will give consumers who live near an Ausgrid community battery the choice of signing up to an “Energy Storage as a Service” (ESaaS) energy plan that includes battery-stored renewable energy, England says.
These consumers might be homeowners or renters. They might have solar panels installed, or they might not. Only consumers who already have a home battery are barred from the ESaaS plan, which England believes is the first of its type in Australia.
It costs nothing to sign up for an ESaaS plan, and the plan will potentially reduce each consumer’s power bill by about $200 a year, but England concedes the capacity of these smaller batteries is limited. An Ausgrid community battery launched in Bondi in August has a capacity of about 400 kilowatts per hour, which can only cater for about 500 customers.
Capacity for hundreds more
Ausgrid plans eight much larger community batteries. Installed across the network over the next 18 months, and physically the size of a basketball court and the height of a house, each will have capacity of 10 megawatts per hour – 25 times that of the smaller batteries.
“We have the capacity to do hundreds of them and create a significant amount of storage capacity in the network,” England says.
“There’s a lot of talk about the 100- and 200-megawatt hour batteries on the network; there’s a lot of talk about batteries behind the meter in customers’ homes and businesses. This is a middle layer – the sweet spot between the two.”
England says Ausgrid is planning to instal about 200 of these 10-megawatt batteries in the future, which will “bring the cost of storage down for average consumers and ensure the network as a whole is more secure”.
Ausgrid’s 10 smaller community batteries are now soaking up community-generated solar power during the day and will send it back to residences during evening peak consumption hours.
The distributor has consulted extensively with communities on the siting of the local batteries, England says, and response to the scheme has been extremely positive. More energy retailers are expected to join the ESaaS program.
Federal government subsidies for the batterieshave been essential to establish the community batteries scheme and allow Ausgrid and other organisations to “get up the innovation curve and down the cost curve”, England says. “Eventually, we won’t need subsidies for any of these batteries.”
Retailers can sign up to sell renewable power stored in the Ausgrid batteries, England says, but they have to allow other retailers access to that capacity. “There’s no district monopoly being created here by a retailer and certainly not by Ausgrid. We’re enabling competition to happen.”
Battery storage and grid integration research leader at the Australian National University Dr Marnie Shaw says several community battery models are on trial around the nation to determine which provide the most benefit for householders and for the grid.
“It’s important to acknowledge not everyone is in a situation where they can have a household battery,” she says. They can cost several thousand dollars each, and are complicated to instal and manage.
More broadly, Shaw says she is astonished at how quickly the large battery field is evolving. “Every year there’s a huge shift to becoming more affordable and safer,” she says, noting she would like to see a community battery scheme that doesn’t require customers to actively sign up or to switch retailers.
“We know from social research that householders want bills that are predictable and easy to understand, and that householders are often too busy to shop around for new or cheaper products,” she says.
Tristan Edis, director at energy advisory firm Green Energy Markets, has crunched the cost-benefit community battery numbers. He is dubious about the community battery schemes’ overall financial benefit to taxpayers.
“There’s a lot of taxpayer money going into this and there’s not a lot of benefit flowing to end-consumers or taxpayers,” he says.
“In my view, network monopolies realise that if consumers instal batteries on their own premises at scale, like they have with solar, they will increasingly question why they have to continue to pay so much in network charges. To avoid this, networks are keen to promote ‘community’ batteries instead.”