Dynamic Solar Exports Are The Future – And A Good Thing

SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock weighs in on dynamic (aka flexible) solar exports, which he believes are the future for home solar power in Australia – and around the world.

Hello from South Australia, where South Australia Power Networks, the local electricity network, have just announced that they’re going to start trials of something called dynamic solar export limiting.

Now, why should you care about this if you don’t live in South Australia? Because it’s coming to the rest of Australia – probably – that’s my educated opinion. Not that I’m that educated, but this is really, really important because it’s a paradigm shift in how we use and generate energy.

Solar energy has always been variable. In the morning it’s like this. If it’s a sunny day, it goes like this. In the middle of the day, it’s like this and then it comes down. Yeah, we get that. But everything else is going to become variable to deal with the variable renewables that are going to become pretty much a hundred percent of the grid in the next 10 years probably.

So that means how you use your energy has got to become more variable. And by that, I mean, you actually have to change how you use energy to integrate more solar into the grid.

So, you don’t just switch stuff on and off and it goes on and off, and you don’t think about it. You have to think about when you’ll use it. Well, in fact you won’t have to think about it – a computer will think about it for you and switch these things on and off.

And the same with exporting to the grid. You just can’t bang all this lovely solar into the grid. Sometimes the grid doesn’t need it. So again, it won’t be your choice. In South Australia’s example, it will be SAPN and they’ll have a pretty smart computer deciding, “hey, you’re only allowed to export this, you’re only allowed to export that”. Everything’s going to go variable and controlled in a really sophisticated manner.

Source: solarquotes