(Bloomberg) -- Australia’s main grid is seeking powers to curb the amount of electricity supplied by the nation’s ubiquitous rooftop solar panels.
The Australian Energy Market Operator wants nationwide backstop mechanisms to manage the daily flood of output from the systems, it said Monday. With panels on a world-leading one-in-three households, the nation is undergoing one of the most rapid shifts away from a coal to a renewables-dominated grid.
“Increasingly, rooftop solar is the single largest source of electricity supply during certain hours of the day — and on some sunny days, electricity supply from these systems can exceed total demand in certain parts of the grid,” said BloombergNEF analyst Sahaj Sood. “For short periods this isn’t a huge problem, but for long periods of time, or when the grid is really oversupplied, it can become unstable or even damage connected infrastructure.”
The request for further control over the grid comes after AEMO was forced to issue some of its highest urgency alerts last week for New South Wales, the most populous state, after planned and unplanned outages at several coal and gas plants threatened power reserves. The nation’s coal plants are aging and increasingly being forced to ramp up or down generation during the midday peak when solar output is at its highest.
AEMO’s emergency solar management scheme requires systems to have the ability to be remotely switched off during a so-called extreme minimum operational demand event. The grid operator is urging for backstop mechanisms to be in place by end-2025 to ensure operational security.
States including Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia already have rooftop solar management programs.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.