New South Wales-owned electricity infrastructure company Essential Energy has partnered with retailer Origin Energy to rollout 35 pole-mounted community batteries to five New South Wales (NSW) regional cities to trial peak demand management using local rooftop solar systems.
Over 27% of Essential Energy’s customers have installed solar on their rooftops, which the company forecasts will increase to over 60% by 2037.
Essential Energy (EE) will install and maintain the 40 kVA / 85 kWh Ecostore pole-mounted community batteries provided by Queensland-headquartered Ecojoule Energy.
Under EE’s two-year Pole-Mounted Battery Trial, the company has partnered with Origin to orchestrate the batteries through its virtual power plant (VPP).
Origin will also offer storage-as-a-service for customers with or without solar systems, including non-Origin customers in the trial areas.
Providing a 2.5 MWh of total capacity for approximately 600 customers, the batteries have most recently been installed at Wagga Wagga in the state’s southern Riverina region.
Installations will follow in the mid north coastal city of Port Macquarie, the northern tablelands city of Armidale and western region cities of Bathurst and Dubbo.
The Essential Energy Pole Mounted Battery Trial involves 2.5 MWh of total capacity for approximately 600 customers.Essential Energy’s Chief Operating Officer Luke Jenner said the batteries are connected to the electricity grid to service nearby homes.
“The purpose of the trial is to understand firstly technically how the batteries work and understand how we can install them safely and make sure they’re reliable in the community and also to understand what the community’s reactions are to having the battery in the community,” Jenner said.
“Wagga Wagga was chosen for the trial because it’s a great location to put the batteries. There is an excess of solar energy throughout the day, and we can use the batteries to store that energy and then reuse it later on.”
“The benefit of a pole mounted battery is that allows customers to generate store and then use their own renewable energy locally within their community,” he said.
The Ecostore is a three-phase battery energy storage system (BESS) consisting of a 40kVA three-phase pole-mounted Statcom inverter and lithium-iron battery (LFP) battery in a stainless-steel cabinet.
A key feature of the outdoor inverter is to provide voltage support and balance power flow between phases. When coupled with a LFP battery, additional grid support features such as arbitrage and FCAS functions can be utilised to benefit the community and distribution network.
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Using several small local grid batteries sounds pretty cool, and it sure could help stabilising the grid. Indeed I feel it sounds like exactly what the doctor prescribed to fix a lot of issue.
BUT, why on top of the pole? What’s the point of that?