New Zealand’s solar industry has the potential to “leap-frog” many of the issues being seen in some high take-up markets and position itself as a core part of the country’s evolving distribution system, Enphase Energy co-founder Raghu Belur says.
Cloud computing and the internet of things means solar and storage systems being installed now can help optimise the performance of the local gird, including providing services like demand response and reactive power.
These technologies are available now, he says. The commercial models are still evolving but the New Zealand industry can benefit from this now.
He says solar power systems being installed now need to be adaptable for the inevitable changes in demand, load patterns, tariffs and regulation they will experience during their 20-year lives. Simply installing “dumb boxes” will provide little benefit and the industry has to be more proactive, he told delegates at the Sustainable Electricity Association of New Zealand conference in Rotorua.
Holy grail
“It’s imperative that as we think about higher levels of PV penetration we start thinking about leveraging these standards of infrastructure – the cloud, the internet, the capability of devices that are fully adaptive.
“It’s a choice that we as an industry make. Do we become a barnacle on the grid and become an absolute pain in the rear- end? Or can we be the brain of the grid?
“There is so much intelligence deep in that network, that not only can you provide end-point monitoring, you can be fully adaptive, you can provide control as long as you are hyper-connected.
“Power conversion is just one of many things that the devices are now capable of doing. In fact we have functions in the device now that have nothing to do with power conversion, or nothing to do with the value it provides to the homeowners. It is actually the potential value and service it can provide to our friends at the utility, because they can use all the data and the control features.
“It will actually help stabilise the grid and make the grid more efficient. Here is the holy grail. The more solar that you have in a network, the more stable, more reliable and more efficient the grid gets. That’s how we are thinking about it.”
Global reach
US-based Enphase, which has a 35-strong engineering and research team in Christchurch, has more than 10 million micro-inverters – more than 2 GW - in 350,000 solar systems in 95 countries.
It is currently collecting two terabytes of data every day from the systems it is monitoring.
Earlier this year, SolarCity formed a partnership with Enphase to use its inverters and communications systems to widen the services it can offer. Next year Genesis Energy will start a trial of Enphase batteries and inverters.
San Francisco-based Belur told delegates that growth in the New Zealand solar industry will not be linear. The change, just like every other solar market he has seen, will be rapid as soon as the economics become compelling. If the country has 7,200 installations now, it should be ready for 72,000 within five years, he says.
“It will happen.”
He says that is a huge opportunity for the country because installers here can deploy the latest technology, avoiding some of the challenges that jurisdictions like Hawaii inherited with the earlier systems.
Distribution
Distributors will also come to quickly understand the potential benefits to them from the smart technologies the new solar systems contain.
He noted that inverters in solar panels have already over-taken the data handling capability of smart meters. Collecting data from meters every 15 minutes is simply “too coarse” when panels can provide data or control every cycle – 16 times a second.
“All of that can be done with orders of magnitude and more sophistication.”
Belur says that five years ago, he served on a conference panel with an executive from one US utility which had no interest in solar.
“Today that same utility is owning generation assets at the home. That same utility is actively pushing the solar industry saying ‘I need all these functions, I need all these smarts so I can make my grid more efficient and more reliable.’
“I expect that same thing will happen here.”
Winning technology
Earlier in the conference, SEANZ chairman Brendan Winitana told delegates that they should feel good because they are backing winning technologies of solar and storage.
He noted that the country has just under 30 MW of grid-connected solar, which has grown 82 per cent in the past year “which is pretty reasonable”.
The country has another 14 MW of off-grid solar.
Winitana says street prices for solar in New Zealand have fallen to $2.90 a watt this year, from $3.17 in 2014 and $5.40 in 2010. And that trend will probably continue.
He told delegates the industry needs to think less about the energy industry as a pipe and of it more as a platform allowing consumers a greater role in making and sharing energy and using and providing other services.
That means thinking about users less like customers and more like clients.
Winitana says leading lines companies have clients and have developed a suite of non-regulated services for them. That gives them a one-on-one direct relationship for a vertically integrated business.
“If you own that relationship with the end customer and turn them into client, you have a captive audience,” he says.
“And that’s an advantage the PV industry has. If you sell and install this stuff, you have a huge advantage.”
Reprinted with permission of Energy News. By Gavin Evans.