The Australian Energy Market Operator has triggered a major technical review to ensure the country’s grid connection rules can keep up with new technologies, and to grease the wheels to meet the country’s ambitious new renewable energy targets.
The pace of change in technologies has been so quick that when big batteries first made their appearance five years ago – think of the original Tesla Big Battery at Hornsdale, and those that followed in its footsteps – there wasn’t even a proper form to fill out.
Authorities are still scrambling to keep up with rapidly evolving technical capabilities of inverter based technologies – wind, solar and battery storage – and how they can be incorporated into a grid designed around spinning machines and synchronous generation.
That urgency has intensified over the last six months since the Coalition was voted out of office, because of the ambitious new targets assumed and set by federal and state governments.
The new federal Labor government has assumed an 82 per cent share of renewables by 2030, and state governments have reinforced this with their own targets.
Federal assumptions underpinned by state targets
NSW has long been working on its own transition from coal to renewables, and has kicked off the first of its new auctions, and Victoria last week announced a 95 per cent renewables targets for 2035, and Queensland last month set an 80 per cent renewables target for the same date.
AEMO estimates that the federal target – which is in line with the Step Change scenario in its own Integrated System Plan – requires at least 4GW of new wind, solar and storage capacity to be installed each year out to 2030, a major acceleration over recent years.
And to help deal with this, it has begun the first big review of its connection rules in five years.
The focus will be on streamlining the connections process which has often been bogged down in huge complexity, and exhausting negotiations, and it will also look at fully embracing new technologies such as grid forming inverters and hydrogen hubs.
The last wholesale review of the connection rules came in 2017, in the wake of the South Australia blackout where the sometimes unhinged political reaction bullied authorities into some pretty lousy outcomes, such as the “do no harm” connection rule that has already been swept aside.
AEMO has recently sought to improve the connection process by developing a world-first “grid connections simulator” that will be launched later this year. It hopes this will help reduce risks, costs and time needed to approve the connection of new projects.
Complex and out of date connection rules
Now it’s turning its attention to the connection rules, which it concedes are overly complex and in some cases out of date.
“This review will consider removing or qualifying requirements that may not add material value and ensuring that technical standards are commensurate with the impact of the plant on the power system,” it says in a new document outlining the review.
“Removing unnecessary technology-specific language and concepts can also improve efficiency of the connection process by avoiding the need for complex, time-consuming negotiations when new technology challenges previous assumptions about plant behaviour.”
One of the main focuses will be on grid forming inverters, now considered to be one of the most crucial pieces of gear for the transition towards100 per cent renewables, but which have been causing headaches for developers because the rules have not caught up.
Several major projects have been unveiled, and supported by significant grants and long term contracts, but have been slow to start doing what they are supposed to be doing because there are no rules to govern their operations, and each project is subject to intense negotiations.
The situation has become critical now, because of the sheer number and scale of battery projects under construction and about to begin.
“Grid-forming inverter technology is likely to be critically important to the energy transition, but the technology is still rapidly developing and industry has limited experience in its application,” AEMO notes in its report.
“AEMO proposes, for this review, to focus on changes to the technical standards that can be expected to facilitate the connection of grid-forming inverter technology and the beneficial capabilities they might provide.”
The arrival of new technologies
Other technologies that will be a focus of the review are synchronous condenser, which are not accounted for in the connection rules as stand alone facilities, and DC Converters, which operate in a similar way to bi-directional inverters.
The emergence of green hydrogen technology, and the prospect of major hydrogen hubs that can act as a load, and potentially a generator, will also be addressed.
“Some very large converter-based loads are already seeking to connect to the NEM, particularly large hydrogen production facilities. The energy transition is also likely to see large numbers of electric vehicle chargers connect to the NEM,” it says.
“Load connections comprising large numbers of hydrogen electrolysers, for example, could have material impact on voltage and frequency stability, when tripped.
“Control systems of converter-based loads may interact with those of other connected plant in the network. This review will consider whether anticipated load developments warrant changes to technical standards for loads considering potential power system security impacts.”
