As the National Energy Market (NEM) changes, you may need to turn off your solar. Solar curtailment is expected to double over the next decade. What would this do to your solar business case?
While DERs will play a considerable role in the future energy market for dispatchable services, in contrast, the growing amount of distributed solar can at times have adverse consequences on the stability grid of the grid from either a frequency standpoint, an economic standpoint, or both. According to AEMO, curtailment is going up, both as an absolute value and as a proportion of total generation. AEMO estimates that by 2050, over 20 per cent of renewable energy will be curtailed.
While curtailment at utility-scale plants is generally well controlled, curtailment methods for rooftop solar across the C&I and residential markets are significantly less sophisticated or do not exist. Many retailers are often paying customers, particularly in C&I to curtail any export from solar to avoid costly negative price events generally in the middle of the day.
Coinciding with the energy markets transition to greater participation of solar and other DERs is the AEMC’s update to the National Electricity Rules and National Energy Retail Rules to enable electricity distributors to charge users for exported electricity – the “Solar Tax”. In most instances this will not alter the business case for dispatching energy to the grid for most DERs and will in fact improve the pathway for monetisation. However, for rooftop solar, curtailment is expected to become mainstream at a rates indicated above.
Maintaining value from solar now requires smart solar curtailment services. These services drive value across your energy resources in a seamless manner. With no additional hardware and managed remotely, our systems deliver a formidable solution to solar curtailment.
Subject to the geographic composition of the curtailment requirements, our solar curtailment solution operates to provide effective use of generated solar rather than wasting solar generation through curtailment alone. This is achieved through matching generation assets that require curtailment to DERs that can consume the excess solar in those same market areas. In addition, our curtailment platform optimises curtailment according to real-time market conditions so that generation from solar is maximised.