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August 18, 2023

SA Power Networks makes rooftop solar smarter

SA Power Networks has invested to provide increased network hosting capacity for rooftop solar. A significant share of renewables on its electricity distribution network comes from excess solar energy exported into the power grid from customers’ rooftop solar panels. To dynamically manage the volume of exports, in addition to avoiding waste or damage to the system at peak generation times, the utility developed the Flexible Exports solution, using Azure IoT for monitoring. In a trial of Flexible Exports, the average customer more than doubled their exported energy. Data collected over the internet from participant households also provides the utility with better network visibility at street level to help improve performance and safety.

SA Power Networks

“The whole process of how customers apply for access, connect, and then integrate their solar panels and batteries into the grid has been developed in an agile way, very rapidly, using Microsoft technologies. That enables us to react very quickly to a rapidly changing market.”

Chris Ford, Executive General Manager, Innovation & Technology, SA Power Networks

Making a commitment to renewables

SA Power Networks distributes electricity to 1.7 million South Australians, across a network area of about 180,000 square kilometers. As the state-wide electricity distributor, the utility provides a safe and reliable supply of electric power to homes and businesses. It’s responsible for building, maintaining, and upgrading the distribution network and for supporting more renewable energy on its power grid. 

South Australia is going through a massive transition from fossil fuel generation and is leading the world in the adoption of renewable energy—in particular, solar. Initiatives from SA Power Networks will help achieve the State’s target of net-100 percent renewable energy generation by 2030.

“We're reaching a point where about 35 percent of the houses in the state now have residential solar installations,” says Chris Ford, Executive General Manager, Innovation & Technology at SA Power Networks. 

Many of those residential solar systems produce more energy than they can use, so the excess is exported into the SA Power Networks grid through inverters installed at each home. In 2022, 100 percent of distribution network demand was regularly met in the middle of the day by rooftop solar. 

On most days, the power fed back into the system is shared with other residential and business customers. But there are times (especially on mild, sunny days in spring) when demand is low and solar generation is high. On those days, the power exported to the grid from consumer systems exceeds localized network capacity. This causes power to go to waste and produces voltage and frequency fluctuations that could potentially damage the grid if not well managed. 

Early on, to manage some of these issues, SA Power Networks applied a flat export limit of no more than 5kW per phase. As the number of installations increased, there was a need to reduce this export limit to 1.5kW to avoid exceeding the technical limits of the network. 

Fixed limits are in place to ensure solar exports do not exceed grid capacity on a few days of the year when supply exceeds demand. But it also meant that the rest of the time, the system couldn’t benefit from the total amount of solar power available. In some areas, it could also limit the addition of new solar customers who could export to the grid.

Meeting the challenges of growing demand

SA Power Networks wanted to innovatively manage the supply of rooftop solar energy by moving away from introducing lower fixed limits, to a more dynamic system. The solution is its Flexible Exports for solar option. This innovative, world-leading solution establishes flexible limits for solar energy exports so they can be managed dynamically in accord with network capacity at any time. It is a far better option for customers than building expensive additional network capacity or banning new connections to the worst-impacted areas of the grid. 

“Banning new connections or limiting exports to a lower fixed limit would reduce displacement of fossil fuel generation,” says Blake Ashton, Network Systems and Data Analyst at SA Power Networks. “We needed to implement a solution to manage the limits in a dynamic fashion.”

The Flexible Exports system communicates over the internet, with a new generation of smart inverters being developed by manufacturers internationally to monitor the power exported and to dynamically publish live network limits to those devices based on near real-time power use. 

Creating a smarter solar export system

The company was already using Microsoft Azure for many of its business and operations solutions, so it decided to build a proof of concept for the new system on Azure IoT

“Our decision to use Azure IoT was purely about scalability,” says Rocco Lupoi, DevOps Capability Manager at SA Power Networks. “We needed the potential to eventually monitor hundreds of thousands of devices in a live, fast-paced manner, and collect monitoring information at five-minute, if not even shorter, intervals.” 

SA Power Networks’ Flexible Exports solution is the first in Australia to add an internet connection between the power network and the inverters at each household, which is used to: 

    Enroll each customer’s site in Flexible Exports. 

    Monitor each site to collect data at five-minute intervals about the power quality of the energy exported to the grid at the customer’s premises. 

    Generate export limits to ensure the site export is within the limits of the grid. This is achieved by publishing export limits that vary from 1.5kW to 10kW, depending on the local network conditions.

“We have an engine running on Azure every 15 minutes that collects and analyzes static and live information, generates limits, and then publishes those limits to the customer sites,” says Ashton. “This solution provides visibility we've never had before of the power picture at the customers’ premises.” 

The utility launched a trial of Flexible Exports among about 400 users in congested parts of its network in 2021 and 2022. Based on the positive results, SA Power Networks concluded the trial in July 2023 and is now gradually rolling out the solution for all new solar installations.

“The whole process of how customers apply for access, connect, and then integrate their solar panels and batteries into the grid has all been developed in an agile way, very rapidly, using Microsoft technologies. That enables us to react very quickly to a rapidly changing market.”

Blake Ashton, Network Systems and Data Analyst, SA Power Networks

Expanding the green energy footprint

Trial customers were able to export up to 10kW, or the full capacity of their systems 98 percent of the time, with limited restrictions placed on their system to export only at rare times. 

“The benefit to customers is we will be offering two options – either a lower fixed 1.5kW limit or the option of Flexible Exports, which means they can, when space is available, essentially put any surplus they have into the grid,” says Ford.

Increasing those solar exports means that more low-cost, renewable energy is available to all customers in South Australia.

Building a more cost-effective network 

The most obvious cost advantage of the Flexible Exports solution is that it can minimize the need to increase the capacity of the distribution network, which requires expensive capital investment funded by all customers. Instead, SA Power Networks has focused on optimizing the network and customers’ equipment working together to manage energy flows dynamically. 

Enhancing visibility for better customer service and safety

Collecting data from smart inverters over the internet gives SA Power Networks visibility for the first time into network conditions down to the local level. Using this data, it can respond more quickly to potential performance or safety problems. 

“If a customer contacts our call center with something that doesn’t look right, we have visibility into the system through the Azure IoT monitoring system, so we can troubleshoot things without having to send personnel to their site,” says Ashton. 

This visibility also provides safety benefits. The system runs algorithms over the collected data to detect faulty equipment. For example, it was able to detect when a neutral line was faulty, which enabled the utility to send a field crew to fix the line before it caused any issues. 

SA Power Networks also uses this street-level data to plan its investment to meet customer demand in the future.

Supporting rapid response to market changes

Using Azure IoT Hub and Azure DevOps in development has decreased time to market for many of the utility’s new innovations, including Flexible Exports. 

“The whole process of how customers apply for access, connect, and then integrate their solar panels and batteries into the grid has all been developed in an agile way, very rapidly, using Microsoft technologies,” says Ford. “That enables us to react very quickly to a rapidly changing market.”

For developers, this means faster development environment setup and quicker solution iterations. “The flexibility to spin something up and then spin it down if we needed to, was probably one of the biggest positives because it's not an arduous journey to test something and make sure it functionally ticks all of our boxes before we move forward,” says Lupoi. “We integrate heavily with Azure DevOps and we have a lot of pipelines and automated deployments, so from a coding-to-delivery perspective, it's very streamlined and very manageable.” 

Paving the way to the future

“We are building a next-generation digital utility,” says Ford. “It’s all about how we can use digital technologies to transform the organization so it's set up for success and able to adopt and manage this new world of distributed energy, which the grid was not originally designed for."

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