Company Updates

Grid giant ponders battery solution

Transgrid is weighing options around grid-scale battery storage with 1MW-sized installations for commercial customers.

Regulatory strategy manager Anthony England says the company is looking to partner with commercial businesses “with room for a container out the back and solar PV on their roof”.

The NSW-based transmission network aims to optimise distribution of power and avoid expensive infrastructure upgrades by using battery storage for commercial businesses, where customers will be able to balance peak and off-peak demand.

“We’d like to use storage to address network capacity limits – which are only hit several times year when things get tight,” England said at the Australian Energy Storage conference in Sydney in early June.

“Once we get into this space, we can take learnings from the installation, the performance and the algorithms … and start to think how to unlock larger scale applications – not just to address network capital expenditure and the opportunity to defer that spending, but also to look at some edge of grid possibilities.”

Transgrid is not alone in employing batteries as a way of keeping network costs down. A study by Ausnet has already found savings from “shared solar” are about equal for households and networks.

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