AEMO has today released the Electric Vehicle (EV) Technical Standards for Grid Operation Report, which identifies the potential benefits and risks with EVs forecast to growth from <1% today as a percentage of road transport to 60% by 2040.
The report highlights opportunities to focus on facilitating collaboration and engagement with local distribution network businesses and in international standards processes to enable two-way knowledge sharing and coordinated action with the intent to ensure the efficient integration of EV and their charging equipment across the National Electricity Market (NEM).
Authored by AEMO’s consultant EnX, the report provides recommendations to AEMO and the industry at large. These recommendations span risk mitigation strategies for disturbance ride-through, cyber security and software management, loss of communications, system restart, and load steps. They will be considered and prioritised as part of AEMO’s work with industry on consumer energy resources (CER) integration.
This report comes at a time of increasing understanding of the value that CER integration can unlock across the NEM. The recently completed Project EDGE successfully demonstrated efficient and scalable trading of electricity services from coordinated CER, including small scale rooftop solar, batteries and controllable energy devices, such as hot water systems.
The AEMC recently released its review into CER Technical standards, with AEMO soon to provide an update to its April 2023 report on CER compliance with the AS4777.2 standard. AEMO’s report indicates that the energy sector’s voluntary collaboration has led to substantial improvements in compliance. AEMO also continues to support action to reform broader governance arrangements for CER devices such that the industry is better placed to manage the life cycle of CER standards and looks forward to working with government and industry to bring this to life.
AEMO has submitted two rule change proposals to improve flexibility and trading of CER to unlock value for consumers and to facilitate better integration of flexible CER into the power system. Both rule changes are progressing with the AEMC which has now published a Consultation Paper on integrating price-responsive resources into the NEM and a Directions Paper setting out the Commission’s initial views and positions for unlocking CER benefits through flexible trading.
All the above-mentioned work is in line with AEMO’s commitments under the Engineering Roadmap to understand, manage and enable participation of CER in high volumes. AEMO will continue to prioritise the delivery of projects and reforms that seek to maximise the value of CER while ensuring wholesale energy continues to be delivered safely, reliably, and as affordably as possible for the decades ahead.