Event

Going Model-Free: The Future of Flexible Export Limits

The increasing adoption of residential rooftop solar PV and batteries in Australia has led to a paradigm shift in how distribution companies (known as Distribution Network Service Providers [DNSPs]) will set export limits. Instead of using static (fixed) export limits designed to ensure the integrity of the poles and wires for a few critical hours in the year, DNSPs will offer flexible export limits that can vary in time. This means consumers can export much more for large periods of time when the network is OK and less when it is congested.

While this is great for consumers, the correct calculation of such flexible export limits would normally require power flow analyses and, consequently, accurate residential low voltage (LV) network models (the poles and wires our houses are connected to). This, however, can be challenging for DNSPs as such models are rarely available and are costly and time-consuming to produce.

To overcome this challenge, the project “Model-Free Operating Envelopes at NMI level” has successfully demonstrated that is possible to exploit the historical smart meter data of consumers to capture the physics of LV networks and create an electrical model-free approach to calculate flexible export limits. The approach represents an accurate, cheap, and extremely fast alternative to traditional model-drive approaches, enabling DNSPs to bypass the costly, time-consuming, and error-prone process of producing and validating electrical models.

In this webinar Prof. Nando Ochoa Pizzali and Vincenzo Bassi Zillmann present the full model-free approach to calculating flexible export limits developed throughout this 2-year project and demonstrate its application using real smart meter data from hundreds of Victorian customers. Highlighting its benefits, considerations, and its effectiveness in cases with partial smart meter data availability.

Categories: Webinar