(REPOST: Energy Storage News)
In the past couple of weeks, mentioning Australia and energy storage in the same sentence was likely a reference to Tesla powering up its 100MW / 129MWh lithium-ion system in South Australia. However, the Canberra project was being referred to as householders’ own ‘big battery’.
Australian renewable energy tech provider Reposit Power has created various platforms for managing energy storage batteries and their use in integrating rooftop solar into the grid. Reposit and project partner ActewAGL, which is a joint venture formed by utilities including major AGL, said on 30 November – a day before the Tesla battery was officially ‘switched on’ – that homes involved were about to “synchronise their battery systems to sell energy back to the grid”.
Reposit Power debuted GridCredits, a platform for trading and storing energy – and selling it back to the grid three years ago, available to individual homeowners. Through its trading system, rooftop PV owners are able to ‘access’ energy equivalent to what they have generated from sunshine – at all times of day and night including peak times.
Energy-Storage.News first reported on Reposit’s GridCredits in late 2014, when the company was awarded a AU$445,000 (US$365,000) grant to trial the technology from the Australian Renewable Energy Association (ARENA). Reposit was also involved in the creation of deX (Decentralised energy exchange), another trading and sharing scheme run by tech company GreenSync as a software-based marketplace.
The 250-home Canberra project appears to be the biggest such undertaking Reposit has become involved in to date. Householders will be able to sell their surplus PV power back to the grid, while the aggregation of resources will allow the batteries to support the grid at peak times. The aggregated generation capacity of the household systems is 1MW.