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Authorities look to control household rooftop solar power systems to stabilise the grid.

Sharing in some measure of grief and frustration at just how stupidly we have used solar PV in Australia. Short thread follows... abc.net.au/news/2019-12-0…
For as long as I have had any voice in Australian energy (small though it is) I been saying saying variants of "Er...solar. We're doing it wrong".

We have now done it wrong so long and so deep that we are seeing truly idiotic outcomes popping up around the country.
Nearly every Australian capital is summer-peaking. Our peaks cf our averages are extreme by world standards. Our peaks occur ~4-7 pm in extreme heat. The extreme heat is virtually always extremely sunny. Even on non-extreme days, this is normally when power is most scarce/$$$
So in the mid 00s policy people are scratching their chins...there is this solar pv tech that might get cheaper. Seems really popular. How shall we incentivise this? As an individual consumer purchase? Or as part of a system? 🤔
Yeah we went individual by stumping up cash to houses to install systems, and then paying very high prices for as much as they could produce. Right from the start, our approach to PV undermined a planned, national, coordinated responses to climate change and energy transition.
Our policy baked in an 'every house for itself' attitude to addressing climate change. We're in it together? Bollocks we are. We need to fix the system? No, screw the system I'm going to use other people's $ to 'going of grid' (except virtually no one cuts the cord).
This was reinforced with the advent of renewable energy certificates (RECs). Home owners could drop the cost of their system by deeming a lifetime of RECs up-front. More RECs = lower $ from homeowner. So incentive again was to maximise *production* instead of *value*.
The same blunt policy instrument was used to incentivise both wind (at scales of hundreds of MW) and household solar (at <10 kW), despite these solutions having vastly different attributes.
Why the hell did not not think in terms of the system? Power grids are the world's largest single machines - vastly more than the sum of their parts. Perturb the machine without taking a systems approach at your peril. Well, we did just that.
If grid is summer peaking, with huge disparity in prices, peaks ALWAYS occurring 4-7 pm and NEVER occur at midday, is PV best deployed facing:
a) North (maximal production, minimal system value, waning steeply at peak demand)
b) West (lesser production, vastly higher value) 🤔
For want of 90 degree orientation, we have made solar a network problem instead of a network solution. In location after location, the value of some solar production is at-or-near zero at midday. Later on same day wholesale price might be $1000. 🤦‍♂️
We now have extraordinary ramp rates to supply the evening peak (see duck curve). We have voltage problems in local feeders from midday over-supply . And of course the cannibalisation of market has slowed the market from 'tsunami' to trickle.
1. Why/how did this happen? Let me count the ways. Governments (both) caving to populist shortcuts instead of doing the hard work of planning for an energy transition neither major party actually wants or believes in -that's an awfully good place to start and remains the case
2. Making a national sport out of disrespecting the profession of engineering, mocking those who built and ran an excellent grid, not seeking, heeding, prioritising their advice and caution. Watching the nation twig that 'frequency control' is physics, not politics, has been 😤
3. Expecting fish to ride bicycles. Our truly idiotic obsession with forcing only wind and solar generation to power an advanced economy led to the focus on 'volume over value'. Thinking if we just make enough of the stuff (renewable electricity) we win. No. We don't.
4. Those policies lead to a boom industry of companies installing dumb solar systems who quickly become an effective rent-seeking lobby group. Nothing perpetuates policy against national interest quite like private interests.
Our refusal to respect the engineering miracle of a functioning grid, and instead screw with it through the lens of ideology, is not doing us any favours. The national discussion relating the term 'base load' for example has verged on Python-esque.
That Australia, of all nations, has managed to turn solar PV from a useful technological solution into *the* emerging network problem is a frightful legacy of policy incompetence.
Where to from here? I fear the instinct is to find the next few ways to re-enable a concept that is *fundamentally* bad from a systems point of view - more and larger north facing PV systems, instead of changing the whole approach to something system-smart.
We might push the problem a few years into the future, but it will only be there and worse when we have to face it again. Time to work with the system, with the grid, with solutions to hand, instead of breaking it in the name of wind and solar 'winning'.
Let's make PV what it should have been all along - a value solution for the grid. Nearly always that's gonna mean west facing, with production that is lesser quantity and far higher value. Nearly every day of the year that will help, some days will be of extraordinary value.
The idea that wholesale is $16,000 /MWh, while millions of home systems are quickly waning in output is totally absurd. In Australia solar PV fits that problem virtually hand-in-glove.
For the rest of the supply, which would be (waaaaay flatter and easier to plan for), deploy nuclear and other renewables with necessary (not 'over') investment in storage and transmission that will aid both.
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