Winner: Innovation and Collaboration in Energy

South Australia boasts the highest penetration of rooftop solar in the world. In late 2019, the national electricity market operator, Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), identified an imminent threat to the state’s power system security due to the continued uptake of rooftop solar PV and AEMO’s ability to manage resulting minimum demand on the system.

Working with the South Australian Government and AEMO, SA Power Networks developed an innovative voltage management solution that could provide world-first solar ‘feed-in-management’ capability.

The Enhanced Voltage Management (EVM) project provided a solution to managing system security emergencies, and has significantly improved network capacity to host solar at all other times. The solution also avoided the need for expensive network capacity upgrades.

Voltage management systems in substations supplying 80% of SA customers have been upgraded to enable fine-grained, real-time management of voltage. This can be used if needed to increase state demand by lifting the system voltage above the high-voltage trip point of existing solar inverters.

No retrofits were required to customer solar systems, there was negligible impact on customer amenity, and the same capabilities can, and are, being used to better manage voltages on a day-to-day basis, more than doubling solar hosting capacity of the SA distribution network.

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